Conservative Advocate: What’s wrong with a heart attack?
The other day I read a newspaper story reporting that, thanks to recent developments in medical research, deaths from childhood leukemia had been reduced from 85 percent to just 10 percent. This is surely unalloyed good news. Not only are these young lives saved, but parents are spared the agony of watching their children die — surely one of the cruelest of all imaginable fates. I saw it inflicted on my college roommate, who not only lost his 7-year-old daughter but (as not infrequently happens) watched the tragedy destroy his marriage as well.
The article then went on to rejoice that, again thanks to medical breakthroughs, heart attacks now kill fewer people, and kill them at much later ages, than they used to. Once again, this is good news — at least, up to a point. My father died at 52 because the heart-lung machine, which made bypass surgery possible, hadn’t been invented in 1947. In 1988, it was made plain to me that I would probably be dead within a year if I didn’t have bypass surgery. So I had it (and sextuple bypass surgery at that) — and this July I will celebrate, or at least observe, my 80th birthday.
So I am all in favor of medical progress, when it is a matter of prolonging lives that still have some utility — and I don’t mean utility to others, but to oneself. What’s more, I am well aware that many people will fight ferociously for a few extra years or even months of life, whether they expect to enjoy them or not. The sheer instinct to survive is immensely powerful, as it probably ought to be.
But I confess that I don’t particularly relish the idea that modern medicine is making it harder and harder to die of a heart attack or a stroke, or even cancer, if the alternative is to save us oldsters for future years when Alzheimer’s has reduced us to cackling caricatures of ourselves, unable to recognize our own children.
In Sherwin Nuland’s excellent book “How We Die” (Vintage Books, 1995), Dr. Nuland’s first chapter describes his experience, as a young intern, in trying to save an elderly man who had been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack. The patient’s heart was “fibrillating,” or quivering, unable to resume a steady beat, and Nuland tells how he opened the chest cavity and actually massaged the heart. To no avail, however; the man died within hours.
By the end of the book, Nuland has led us through a dozen other descriptions of the coming of death, most of them agonizing, many of them long, drawn-out, and some of them positively hair-raising. And, in my case at least, I found myself actually envying the old fellow whose quivering ticker had led the parade. He got it right, I reflected — it was all over, from soup to nuts, in a matter of hours.
The trouble, I suppose, is that medical researchers can’t fine-tune their therapies to save a patient who gets a heart attack at 50, but have no effect on one who is 80. And, as noted above, I am under no illusion, anyway, that everybody, or even most people, are ready to pack it in at 80.
But there is something not fully rational about a medical system that puts a premium on saving lives at any age, at any cost, without any thought for the fate that may await the “lucky” survivors.
I have no use for those who would euthanize the elderly just for society’s convenience, nor do I favor “assisted suicide” a la Dr. Kevorkian. It is not for us, let alone others, to decide when we shall die. But I will not sneeze at a fatal heart attack, if that is my destiny. When I was just 16, I perpetrated a piece of doggerel of which this was the last verse:
“And when Death comes, let me see its face —
Let me meet it, greet it, and hold it tight.
Let my day be long, without twilight’s grace.
Let it swiftly end in eternal night.”
William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.
(Copyright 2003, Newspaper Enterprise Assn.)