Cat an I agreed that, godess forbid, we found ourselves in that situation, we would give each other at least 6 months, but no longer than a year with no brain activity before we would pull the plug.

one year. any longer and it would be selfish of me to be a drain on my families resources.

Six months to a year. If I don't make it out by then, then screw it.

Cat an I agreed that, godess forbid, we found ourselves in that situation, we would give each other at least 6 months, but no longer than a year with no brain activity before we would pull the plug.


6 months to a year, sounds legit to me.

One month. 

-DR

One week, if I was brain dead, and on life support, I would rather not continue to have tubes shoved up nose or hooked up to a machine for that matter.

I agree with crazymom on the first part but if i had a chance at recovery i would prefer to be supported indefinitely with all the members of congress who were so gung-ho about "saving" Terri paying for my medical bills out of their own pockets. But hopefully none of that is ever an issue for me.

I'm going for the 6 month cut off.

Brain dead or brain damaged, it matters not...

Should either of the above happen to me, pull that plug ASAP...

Brain dead or brain damaged, it matters not...

Should either of the above happen to me, pull that plug ASAP...


I feel the same way, Paul. What a sorry topic this is.  :(

I went with indefinately due to personal beliefs.  I think suicide is wrong and to me it would be suicide.

To me brain dead is dead, I don't care if they can keep your heart beating or not, you are useless without your brain. So if I was in fact brain dead, I say pull the plug immediately.

The only reason I distinguished between the 2 is there is a good chance that you can recover to a fairly functional level (sometimes almost to the same place you were before the damage) if your brain is damaged


I hear what you say there, crazymom...but I can't help feeling that sort of chance would be somewhat remote...

Even then, you'd be looking at some sort of dependency...not for me...

1 month.  That would be enough for any family to cope with.

Having gone through a series of debilitating strokes with my mother, I guess I didn't get to the subtilty of the issue.  With each one, my mom lost a bit of her mind, and finally was living in the past, present, and (to an extent) the future.  I spoke to her every weekend, and I can tell you that it was painful, like perpetual mourning, but much of her was still there, evan though by the end she was on a feeding tube.  As my sister said at her funeral, each stroke to a bit more of her, but the one thing that she never lost was her ties with her family.  Her mother and father (both long dead) visited her.  My (never born) brother visited her.  Yet she knew me and my sister, and all her many brothers and sisters until the end.  I was relieved when she passed, but I miss her still.  The years of perpetual mourning were a torture those, and mostly for what my father went through, and lost.

I hope not to generate lots of debate with this.  These are difficult questions.  I have no answers.

If you're brain dead, what's the point of keeping your body alive? What are you going to do? Your thought processes, memory, and logic and sensory centres have stopped. Even your motor functions are being kept active by machines. Get this: you can't hear, see, feel or taste. You can't think or process information, and you have no memories. You're basically already dead, but with a heart beat. It's impossible to recover from that, so what's the point in keeping the machines switched on? My wife has already told me she doesn't want to be kept on life-support if the need ever arises because she doesn't believe in it. Seriously, if there's no more than a snowflake's chance in hell of ever recovering, what's the point? We all have to go sometime, after all.