From Billmon, a sighting of a sentimental crusader. The really awful thing, when I look at this story, is that I know what the cries of a PVS patient sound like. In the Cheshire Home where I met my first wife, there was a stroke patient who had almost reached that state. She could, just, swallow for herself. To feed her, you would sit for an hour or so every day, putting teaspoons of goo in her lips and saying, over and over again “swallow, Molly”. Sometimes, she would swallow.
She was kept propped up on pillows, though her head always sagged, so that it seemed to anchored to the pillows by a long silvery plait of drool whenever I looked in the room.
Her face was very sweet. Her eyes were sometimes open, and bright blue, like anemones. She never focussed and never spoke, but when we shifted her to tend the bedsores on her withered legs, she would howl feebly so it seemed to come from very far away. These noises haunted me for years.
They seem to haunt the torturer who is trying to keep Terri Schiavo alive. But how could he hear those voices, and not the ones of his victims, who must have been much stronger and more conscious of their agonies, at least when he started his work?