I was healthy, 35 years old, and eight months pregnant when I signed legal forms stating that if I was ever unconscious due to an irreversible illness I did not want doctors to use extraordinary measures to prolong my life. No breathing machines. No feedings through a tube. No water by vein. Nothing.
I’ll admit it was an unusual preoccupation amid the crib buying and name choosing. But as I prepared to enter the hospital for delivery, I was haunted by the ghost of a former patient, a woman close to my age who entered a hospital for minor surgery and spent half a decade unconscious in a hospital bed.
Melissa’s medical history is a long saga in which very little happens. She was an aspiring actress in 1986, when she went to her local hospital for minor elective surgery--a scraping of the uterine wall--under general anesthesia. Sometime during the surgery an accident occurred-- possibly a malfunction of the anesthesia equipment--and the oxygen stopped flowing to her lungs. By the time the doctors realized what was happening, her brain had almost suffocated.
It didn’t have to happen: uterine scrapings are frequently performed with just sedation and local numbing. And only a few years later it couldn’t have happened: today virtually all anesthesiologists use pulse oximeters, skin sensors that constantly report the oxygen content of a patient’s blood, allowing them to remedy plummeting levels before symptoms or damage occur. But it did happen.
