The story:
A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them – but could make no sound.
‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,’ said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.
‘I dreamed myself away,’ he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer.
Doctors used a range of coma tests before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was ‘extinct’.
But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.
Mr Houben described the moment as ‘my second birth’. Therapy has since allowed him to tap out messages on a computer screen.
The Culture of Death will be dismayed by this.
Honestly, people, we must always err on the side of life. Those who are insistent upon killing or allowing to die people we might perceive as being “brain dead” or what have you are making assertions of impossible knowledge. If someone’s heart is beating and his other vital signs are normal, then that person is alive – and for all we know is thinking deeply about his current condition while we think he’s vegetative.
We must not kill the innocent – or allow the suffering to die. We know a great deal about our brains, but even in that are our knowledge is still limited – and we know nothing of the mind which uses the brain to manipulate things in the natural world. We’re making judgments based on partial knowledge – and for entirely ideological reasons. Because some people want to think that a human being is just the accidental result of blind, materialist-determinist evolution, they will insist we kill those humans they believe are not up to snuff.
With stories like this, any person of good will must come down hard on the side of life – if someone is to die, then they will die…with more or less suffering, but entirely outside of our control. Our duty is to do as well as we can by the suffering and then leave the rest in the hands of the Author of Life.
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