by Susan Brinkmann OCDS
Staff Writer
(Feb. 7, 2008) Lauren Marie Richardson was only 21 years old when she overdosed on heroin in August, 2006, fell into a coma and was put on life support. Because she was three months pregnant, doctors kept her alive until her daughter was born in February of 2007, then withdrew life support, at which time everyone expected her to die.
But Lauren survived and is now in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) requiring only a feeding tube to stay alive. Patients in a PVS lack the higher brain function needed to be able to think and be aware of their surroundings.
This is the same condition suffered by Terri Schindler Schiavo, the Florida woman who was ultimately starved and dehydrated to death in 2005 when, at the request of her husband, a court ordered the removal of her feeding tube.
Many are worried that Lauren will soon share the same cruel fate. Lauren’s mother, Edith Towers, claims her daughter once said she would never want to live like Terri Schiavo. According to court records, Towers claims Lauren told her: “Don’t ever leave me hooked up to life support. I would not want that. I think it is horrible. I think that I do not ever
want to be kept on life support if the doctors say there’s no hope.” Towers claims she and Lauren promised to never allow one another to endure such a state.
Unfortunately, Lauren left no written directive and the only corroboration of the mother’s story is from another family member, an uncle, who claimed Lauren once described Schiavo’s existence as “gross.”
Two weeks ago, Towers was awarded custody of her daughter by the state of Delaware and now wants to fulfill her daughter’s request by having her feeding tube removed.
Lauren’s father, Randy Richardson, is fighting the decision, saying his daughter never mentioned any end-of-life wishes to him. She is still very much alive and responsive, he says, and needs no other form of life support than a feeding tube. With therapy, he believes she will continue to improve and even eat on her own one day.
“We just want to give her a chance,” Richardson told Sean O’Sullivan of Delaware’s News Journal. “She has committed no crime and doesn’t deserve to have this death imposed on her.”
Richardson has taken his appeal for his daughter’s life to national news outlets along with a video of his daughter responding to him from her bed in The Arbors, a nursing home near New Castle.
He has good reason to hope. Scientists know little about the various states of consciousness and research shows that up to 40 percent of all PVS diagnoses turn out to be wrong. A tendency to underestimate levels of consciousness in brain injury results in many patients actually having minimal levels of consciousness and even waking up or being suddenly able to talk after decades
in a coma.
As recently as March, 2004, Pope John Paul II reminded the medical community of this fact.
“We must neither forget nor underestimate that there are well-documented cases of at least partial recovery even after many years; we can thus state that medical science, up until now, is still unable to predict with certainty who among patients in this condition will recover and who will not.”
Irregardless of whether or not they wake up, however, patients in this condition should be treated with respect and dignity, he said, and added his disdain for the use of the term “vegetative state” when describing a human being. “A man, even if seriously ill or disabled in the exercise of his highest functions, is and always will be a man, and he will never become a ‘vegetable’ or an ‘animal.”
The provision of food and water, even by artificial means, is morally obligatory and can only be omitted when a patient is actively dying. Otherwise, he said, withdrawing a feeding tube, if done knowingly and willingly, constitutes “euthanasia by omission.”
Randy Richardson is currently attempting to be appointed guardian of his daughter in an effort to save her life and give her an opportunity to recover.
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