I looked up the obituary of the Belfast doctor who invented the portable defibrillator, and who died in January this year. I did so because it seemed obvious that a lot of suffering is caused by rescuing heart attack victims and other people who never really come back from the emergency room. Of course, that’s no real argument against defibrillators and similar techniques: just an indication that they have some costs as well as benefits. The great majority of decisions about life and death don’t involve removing tubes, but calling an ambulance in time. By their nature, they are taken very quickly, and without any conscious deliberation.
Still, you’d have thought that the man who invented these devices was in favour of life at almost any cost, and in fact he had survived a terrible time as a Japanese PoW after the fall of Singapore: “Of his group of 7,000, only a few hundred survived. Pantridge himself suffered from prolonged and near fatal cardiac beriberi but was possessed of a fanatical will to live. He never forgave the Japanese for what he saw them do to soldiers and civilians alike.”
None the less, the obituarist also recorded that during the retreat of his batallion through the Malayan jungle, “Pantridge, in common with other medical officers, ensured that those so severely wounded that they could not be evacuated would never see the enemy.”
Were all those lives he later saved a way of making up for this?
On a rather less philosophical note, I was watching snaps flash up (Friday night) and was amused to notice a report from a rogue Italian newsagency report that an electrocardiogram showed no heart activity morph with the retelling into a report from some other corner of the globe saying an electroencephalogram showed no brain activity. This was followed, about 20 minutes later, by a terse release from the Vatican saying there was no truth in reports of a zero electroencephalogram reading since there was no such equipment in the papal appartment.
I presume there’s a defrib, but also that they wouldn’t use it.
I was wondering, this morning, how long news of a papal death would have taken to reach London before the advent of the telegraph.
Of course, the interesting fact about the Pope was that he didn’t call an ambulance. One was called for him, when he first passed out — which led to the hospitalisation with the tracheotomy — but when he was conscious, he bloody well decided to die in the Vatican.
Good thing he was able to let his wishes be known, eh? Otherwise he’d have to be kept alive for as long as possible… no, hold on, surely there’s no difference between saying “let me die naturally” and suicide these days, in terms of moral decrepitude.
I’m a bit confused about conservative Christian thinking, death and free will these days. Holy Father, pray for me.
R