almost never place newspaper articles. I want to do that today with the interview of the singer Roger Whittaker, issued to Corriere della Sera on the case of Eluana. I was struck by the disarming simplicity of his views, their reasonableness. No great metaphysical reasoning, only simple and obvious reason that we risk not see more.
LONDON - It would take a caress of the Nazarene, "he says at one point, and is by no means a sentence thrown out, his voice is not even a thread of irony that makes it unique for fifty years his songs. Faced with Eluana and who is in her condition - "people live only in appearance, but he lives" - Roger Whittaker, "secular atheist very imprudent," calls the Christ because he, as a doctor, feels just raise their arms, " Never pull a plug, not the power to suspend a patient to end a life is brutal and shocking. "
It holds true even in against anyone who has spent seventeen years in a vegetative state?
"There are so many, I know, but they are worth to us, and we know nothing of how they lived by a person in coma vigil. Nobody can enter their sleep and tell us what is really mysterious, so it's not just measure it by the time of our clocks. That is why it is always worth waiting for, when and if the time comes, the patient's cells will die by themselves. And then we must not forget that medicine is a wonderful thing, capable of making extraordinary progress and unexpected. "
But once the brain is no longer activated, the wait is not likely to be useless?
"Piano, piano ... useless? Brain dead? We use these expressions too lightly. If it were my son, it only takes one beat of the lashes to make me feel alive. Not bear the thought of not more potergli be close. "
are reflections of a parent or a doctor?
"I as a physician I speak exactly like this: life is always important, not only when it is attractive and exciting, but even if there is helpless and defenseless. Existence is a space that gave us and that we must fill with meaning, anyway. Deciding to stop at a hospital is not how to do a tracheotomy ...».
what it feels like to tell Beppino Englaro?
"We must be very close to this father."
not think that there may be situations where a person has the right to anticipate his own death?
"Yes, when the patient is suffering terribly and the medicine can no longer relieve pain. But even then I never want to be me having to "pull a plug: I am a coward and I am confident that there are doctors braver than me."
how to tackle a sick patient who does not believe its more dignified existence?
"I would try to convince him that dignity does not depend on their health but it is the courage with which we deal fate. And then I would say to his family and his friends around him who feel lonely surrenders first. I speak from experience: I know decides to wonderful guys who manage to live, to love and be loved even if they are aged on a bed or a wheelchair. "
Forty years ago felt the same way?
"At the end of the sixties I went to specialize in cardiac surgery in the United States. In department scolded me: "She falls in love with patient goes to see them too often and is interested in things that have nothing to do with treatment: doctors are technicians, throughout the rest of us are psychologists and priests." They decided to send me to work in intensive care, "so may want to hang on to them until "... behold, stay where life is reduced to a thin wire is traumatic, but can teach many things to a doctor. There is also another, though."
What?
"In recent years the figure of Christ has become for me fundamental: it is the thought of her in order to make it impossible to cross even the idea of \u200b\u200bhelping someone to die. If you return the Nazarene it would take to slap them all. We deserve it, all right, but we need so much of a caress. "
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