Not Dead Yet, Old News Snippiets

Not Dead Yet the resistance in Black Gothic Lettering

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In The News

* Marjorie Nighbert, a 76-year-old Florida woman, was hospitalized after a stroke. At her family's request, the hospital denied Ms. Nighbert's requests for food and water. A hurriedly-convened hospital ethics committee ruled that she was "not medically competent to ask for such a treatment."

Ms. Nighbert was then restrained in her bed to prevent her raids on other patients' food trays.

* Another woman in her seventies, Ruth MacInnes of Los Angeles, was hospitalized in 1990 for a heart ailment. Her doctors presented her with a stack of consent forms for a "quick signature." MacInnes signed. Soon, when she became semi-comatose, her daughter learned that MacInnes had signed a Do Not Resuscitate order prohibiting heroic measures - such as tube feedings. MacInnes lay in a hospital bed without food while her daughter fought frantically for a court to order that the DNR order be rescinded. Her daughter succeeded - after six weeks.

When MacInnes was finally fed, she regained consciousness and lived another seven and a half months - in her own home.

Her daughter says, "They treated both of us like hysterical women."

* A family with a disabled child in Union County, South Dakota, vacated its 120-year-old family farm after receiving four years of serious death threats from neighbors who had learned how much it costs taxpayers to educate their child. Time magazine's writers raised the specter of high tech when reporting this story in October, 1996: "Technology is saving youngsters who 20 years ago would have perished at birth." Feeding tubes, respirators and even speech synthesizers are now referred to as "technology," technology which has perhaps advanced too far.

* A national medical ethics conference in the summer of 1996 headlined Dr. E. Haavi Morreim speaking on the subject of Futilitarianism, Exoticare, Coerced Altruism: The ADA Meets Its Limits. The conference brochure described this lecture further: "Quality of life and end of life care of the incompetent disabled person: The challenge of non-discriminatory discrimination."

* George Delury, former editor of the World Almanac, has pleaded guilty to the crime of attempted manslaughter in the death of his wife, Myrna Lebov, who had multiple sclerosis. Drury prepared a lethal potion of honey and antidepressant, and, according to a relative, intimidated his wife into drinking it.

Prosecutors released transcripts of Delury's computer diary. The diary was entitled "Countdown: A Daily Log of Myrna's Mental State and View Toward Death." That diary made it clear that Delury, not his wife, saw her death as the solution to all their problems. One entry said, "You [Myrna] are like a vampire, sucking the life out of me."

Delury has been sentenced to six months in prison but will likely serve only four months.

* The parents of Brianne Rideout have filed suit against Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, PA, for taking their 3-year-old daughter off life-support in 1992 against their wishes. The child died two days later.

Her hospital medical records contained notations by a hospital social worker saying that the familyÕs health insurance was about to run out.

* Richard Thompson, the Oakland County (MI) prosecutor who tried Dr. Jack Kevorkian was defeated in the August 1996 primary election. Exit polls showed that voters had turned against Thompson for spending taxpayer money to prosecute "that poor old doctor who is just trying to help people."

* Judith Curren, a wheelchair-user with chronic fatigue syndrome and a history of childhood sexual abuse, filed charges of domestic abuse against her psychiatrist husband two weeks before he delivered her, at her own insistence, to Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

Curren had been unable to leave her suburban home which was not equipped with a ramp.

There are only two wheelchair-accessible domestic violence shelters in all of Massachusetts, the Currens' home state.

Her husband called her death "a blessing."

* People with MS, ALS, cancer, spinal cord injuries and even depression (formerly known as sadness) appear on Kevorkian's homemade declaration-of-death videos, begging for death. In late 1995, one of them - a young man only recently diagnosed as having ALS - seemed not quite convinced. His wife reassured him that his choice was correct. "Death is better for everyone," she said.

* In 1993, Mouth published a report about a New Mexico subscriber who rushed to her hospital's emergency room during a severe asthma attack. As she fought for breath, hospital admissions people patiently and diligently explained that she had a right to refuse treatment. Finally, this patient forced the hospital social worker to call a doctor. The social workerÕs parting words were these: "It's not too late. The Right to Die is on hospital channel 6 twenty-four hours a day. You can watch it in your room!" Many hospitals broadcast that channel.

* Both before and after a December 1995 surgical procedure, Mouth's reporter Joe Ehman had to fight off a brigade of hospital, county, and home-health social workers who insisted that he sign a Do Not Resuscitate order (DNR). As Ehman told them, "I'm only 30 years old! I don't want to die!" Dr. Tim Quill, of Vacco v. Quill, practices medicine at, and rents private office space from, that same hospital.

Nine months later, Ehman related his experience during questions and answers following a Quill lecture. In response to his statement that he wishes to live, 250 people in the audience stood, nearly as one, to scream that Ehman should have signed a DNR because he is a burden to society.

Ehman employs a personal attendant/home health aide who will be on 12-hour duty after a second surgery. Ehman has learned from this attendant that home health workers in his county, although trained and certified in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, are not allowed to perform CPR on "clients" such as himself.

* An employee of an AIDS organization told Extra magazine in September 1996 that "In my agency, we developed a pro-killing policy without ever speaking to a person from the disability community."

* According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the suicide rate among people age 65 and older increased 9% from 1980 to 1992. This rise came after four decades of declining suicide rates for the same age group.

An Associated Press article on the CDC report pointed out that the period from 1980 to 1992 "saw the rise of the right to die movement, living wills, Dr. Jack Kevorkian and his assisted-suicide machine, and the publication of Final Exit, the Hemlock Society suicide manual which became a best-seller."

* Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop supports legislation which would bar use of federal funds for assisted suicide. "Society must not allow doctors to be killers as well as healers," he said at an October press conference. "Toleration of doctor-assisted suicide can lead to acceptance of involuntary euthanasia," Koop added.

Faye Girsh, executive director of the Hemlock Society, supports Medicaid funding for assisted-suicide services.

"It should be like any other medical procedure," she said.