Brain dead is spirit lost.

My older sister, Ruth, is dead. A neurologist explained her skull filled with blood exerting pressure on the brain which then stopped sending directions to the body’s muscles and organs. Medics responded when Ruth first complained of a severe headache and later became less communicative and unable to command her muscles. Medics had marvelous technology on hand when they moved her to the ambulance and they immediately administered oxygen though her nose. Liquid and nutrients were put into her vein through a small tube in her arm.
Normally the logistics called for transport via helicopter to the nearest hospital which in this case was the Colby campus of Providence hospital in Everett, Washington. That was where I went only to discover she had not been admitted but instead was taken to Harborview hospital in Seattle. The extreme extent of her injury was apparent and different facilities were required. When I arrived at her bedside and heard the neurologist’s description of her condition, I knew she was dead. When the brain can no longer function, the spirit is gone, the body is dead.
Our medical advances in the last thirty years enabled care givers to sustain breathing which allows the heart to continue to function. Ruth’s heart was strong. Of that there was never any doubt but there are other factors that at the present time are too complex for reversing the process and too insidiously slow in the making over many years to understand.
Our older sister, June, died at age 86 in 2002. Her heart was also strong. That’s in our heritage so that was no surprise. I’m uncertain as to the recorded cause of her death. However, she never smoked - not even second hand but she was grossly overweight which contributed to her inactivity and subsequent loss of muscle tone.
James, our older brother, died in 1983 of lung cancer - so his certificate reads - having been seduced by the tobacco companies’ rhetoric during his service in the army in the 1940s. Smoking was a habit he never gave up, even in the last months of his advancing disease. His wife also smoked so the atmosphere was a constant blue gray. His lungs could not transfer enough oxygen to the heart which in turn, not matter how strong, could not feed the brain and death resulted.
Our younger brother, Emil, was slender and active until the day he died in 1992. One Sunday morning he complained of a headache and laid back on the couch to rest. His wife found him unresponsive when it was time to go to church. Called a stroke, or aneurysm, the skull was flooded with blood that could not get into the capillaries to feed the brain. He was 65 years old.
Not one of these bodies were sustained after the initial “heart attack” was diagnosed. Ruth’s body was sustained by artificial methods which I could have insisted continue and she would have remained in this so called “live” state for as long as I wanted. There were no reflexes, no indication she could think, hear or act. The pressure of the blood on the brain did not kill her. The blood was blocked from the tinier-than-hair capillaries which would have fed the brain. The long time-in-the-making blockage was the cause of death. The medical term, aneurysm, refers to the breach in the artery wall. She was already dead and I would have felt guilty to have pretended she was still with me just because the oxygen machine filled her lungs and visibly raised her diaphragm regularly. The doctor was directed to pull the life support systems. The heart took many minutes to run out of oxygen. She was legally pronounced dead by a physician somewhere in mid-afternoon. To be accurate, she died shortly after 0800 on July 14, 2005.
I am the last of the Hodak siblings. At age of 78, I bought a new car, a Hyundai Accent GLS model on which I am racking up the first thousand miles on a trek to Everett and Bellingham. My heart is strong and how many more years it can continue to supply oxygen to my brain is linked to the health of those capillaries that feed the commanding areas. My eating habits are similar to Ruth’s which were restricted to fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, vitamins and lots of water. So what affect has diet on strength of artery walls? I’ll have to wait and see.
Naomi Sherer