Dr. Owen said that when a healthy patient is given a verbal command to imagine that he or she is playing tennis, there is immediate activity in the brain. To see if patients in a vegetative state had similar brain activity, Dr. Owen tested a group of 20 patients who had been totally vegetative for several months. When the first patient was put into an MRI and told to imagine that she was on the tennis court, there was activity in her brain. When she was told to relax, the activity stopped. Deep within her brain, the woman was "playing tennis."
Amazed, Dr. Owen concluded that at some level, the woman must still be "there." Only 2 additional patients out of the 20 showed similar activity, but Dr. Owen hastened to add that this did not necessarily mean the unresponsive patients were"dead"; instead, they might be deaf and unable to hear the cues.
The story made me wonder about quality of life for the first woman. What part of her brain was still functioning? What was her life like? What part of her was still residing in her body? No one really knows what it's like to be in a vegetative state. We don't know what kind of consciousness that person has or if they are still "there."I believe that each person has a soul and, at some point, that soul departs from the body. But now, with the advances in modern medicine, the answer to the question about when a person actually dies has become murky. We don't know, because the definition of death keeps changing.
This kind of story makes me glad that I filled out an advance directive when the Terri Schiavo story hit. I do believe that, because of Jesus, I will go to heaven when I die, and it makes the idea of dying almost inviting, especially in the face of a future with a chronic progressive disease like MS. But, all that said, the decision to leave life is a wrenching one and not easily made. Life is God's ultimate gift to us, with all its many pleasures, and it is very difficult to leave.
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