Case analysis ″will they ever pull the plug?″
About Seventy-six-year-old Wilma Beard calls on Methodist Hospital to remove her husband from a respirator after six weeks and let him die in peace. The hospital refuses on the grounds it’s against the law for anyone but a doctor to do a thing like that. Elmer Beard, 81, suffered a stroke Feb. 21 which left him paralyzed and in a coma. He was taken to Methodist and put on a life support system. Today he lies there semi-dormant and, says his wife, “recognizing no one while being fed through the nose.” In January and February Beard had been in the hospital 44 days. He was diagnosed then as having cancer of the prostate, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, congestive heart symptoms, angina, and gallstones. Soon after returning home in February he fell to the stroke. “Now they have him in the respirator,” says Mrs. Beard.[unique_solution] “At first Dr. James A. Duncan, the internist in charge, said this would not be long drawn-out. But it has stretched from 36 hours to a week, two weeks and now six weeks. Apparently it will be allowed to go on indefinitely.” I feel my husband is being held in a vise from which he can’t escape. As his wife of 50 years, I am trapped in the same vise, and it’s bringing me untold misery and pain.” Dr. Duncan has called into the Beard case neurologist Morris D. Lampert and Dr. Leopoldo Lapuerta, a lung man, according to Mrs. Beard. All three doctors have their offices in the San Antonio Diagnostic Clinic, 4647 Medical Drive. “Dr. Duncan has informed me on three separate occasions that my husband would not survive for more than one or two hours outside the respirator—if that long,” says Mrs. Beard. “To me that constitutes terminal illness. But he adamantly refuses to disconnect the respirator.” She said the other two officiating doctors are equally adamant, and one took the occasion to explain that her husband “has plenty of good brain left.” Dr. Duncan, reached at his office Tuesday, buttoned up on the Beard case. He said comment from him would break patient confidentiality. He did agree to talk “if the wife completes a proper legal document authorizing me to discuss the case.” “This experience,” said Mrs. Beard, “has left me drained and distraught. My husband’s quality of life was very dubious before he had the stroke, and now his condition certainly appears hopeless. To keep breathing with a machine is nothing short of torture.” She added: “I agree in principle with Gov. Richard Lamm of Colorado, who says keeping terminally ill patients alive by artificial means, at enormous expense to the public, is wicked. And if I had it to do over, I’d have signed with my husband one of those ‘living wills’ under the Texas Natural Death Act of 1977— instructing your physician to with