Euthanasia

"La vraie morale se moque de la morale...
We perish because we follow other men's examples...
Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae--bugbears to frighten children...."


---Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree (1907)

In Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree a young nurse, Justine, administers an overdose of morphine to her friend Bessy, who has been paralyzed in a riding accident. Justine discusses Bessy's case with her doctors, her clergyman, and her lawyer--all of whom confirm that "human life is sacred" and that she must be kept alive at all costs.  Stumbling into the library at Bessy's estate, Justine finds these quotes (among others) carefully pencilled into a flyleaf in a volume of Bacon that belongs to Bessy's husband, John.  These little snippets, taken from Pascal, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, provide her with the strength of conviction that she needs to euthanize her friend.   Yet, while Justine never doubts the rightness of her decision, she is made to pay the price for venturing outside the bounds of societal constraints and norms. 

 One of the book's most interesting twists is its entwinement of euthanasia with feminist politics---that a woman could make a rational (as opposed to emotional) decision to end her friend's life is thought to be the most disturbing aspect of the case.  The other characters are willing to let Justine off the hook if only she will confess to having made the decision while distraught over her friend's condition. But because she insists on defending herself by explaining her careful thinking, she is condemned. 


These quotes induce goose-bumps and provoke deep contemplation about how we arrive at our sense of what is right and what is wrong. The rules we live by are never so simple and so clear as we might wish for them to be.

Spirochetes

" 'What happens is that the spirochetes, if they aren't treated right away, change form, so that the treatment can never catch up with the disease.  Each time the doctor tries something new, the form is different.  The disease goes deeper and deeper into your system.  This man has it in his spinal cord, and it's gone into his brain, he has neurological symptoms.  Now he's going to doctors who have it themselves, to see how they're treating their own diseases.'

I stare down at my arm, mesmerized with horror. 

As she talks, against my will, I am picturing the spirochetes in my own body, spiraling deeper and deeper into my defenseless system, burrowing their way into my spinal fluid, sliding unstoppably into the crevices of my brain.  Each word she speaks makes this real, inevitable, incontrovertible.

All my feelings of triumph, of power and victory, are sliding downward, cascading toward ruin. She is destroying everything I have accomplished."

---Roxana Robinson,  "The Treatment" in A Perfect Stranger (2005)

In this very tight short story, Roxana Robinson captures the struggle of a middle-aged woman who is most likely afflicted with late-stage Lyme disease.  Robinson has tone-perfect dialogue and some very memorable descriptive passages, in particular one that focuses on the apparatus through which the protagonist adminsters her intravenous antibiotic, Rocephin.  What is most remarkable, however, is this story's accurate rendering of the mental enervation of chronic illness, and the divisive and humliating boundary between those who enjoy good health and those who struggle with disease.  In this passage, a patient who has managed to convince herself that she is recovering from her infection has her healing vision dismantled by a nurse (memorably described as "powerful and clumsy, like a shaggy little bull")  who reveals the devastating reality of her disease.   Robinson's account of the "other[ness]" of disease  is a crucial text for anyone who must treat patients with serious illnesses--Lyme disease or otherwise.