Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 3, 1991 TAG: 9102030334
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: B.D. COLEN NEWSDAY
DATELINE: MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. LENGTH: Medium
"Many of the nurses up there have had dreams about her," says Sonnen, a soft-spoken 40-year-old. "I've had one particular dream where I get a call and I have to come down right away because something's wrong with Helga. I can't find my uniform, I can't find my shoes and I toss and turn and wake up in a sweat."
Sonnen, who spends most of his working life caring for Wanglie, says that she is trapped in a limbo between life and death and that he wants her machine to be turned off so she can die. Since May, she has been in a vegetative state, maintained by a mechanical respirator and a feeding tube. The other nurses on the unit and the physicians caring for Wanglie agree that it is "medically inappropriate" to continue to maintain her life artificially - so medically inappropriate that the hospital says it will go to court to ask that a guardian be appointed to answer one question:
Is it in Helga Wanglie's best interest to be maintained in a persistent vegetative state?
Were that the entire story, the Wanglie case wouldn't cause an ethical-judicial ripple, because it would be similar to dozens of termination-of-treatment cases of the past 16 years.
But in those cases, patients' family members have gone to court seeking to force physicians to stop treatment. This case is different: Helga Wanglie's husband, daughter and son are fighting to keep her on life support, arguing that in years past she told them she would never want anything done to shorten her life.
"In our present society today I don't think there's a respect for life that there should be," 87-year-old Oliver Wanglie said as he sat in his wife's hospital room after church on a recent Sunday afternoon. "I'm a pro-lifer. I take the position that human life is sacred." His wife, he said, felt the same way.
The Wanglie case finds many in the right-to-life movement - which has long fought against ending life-sustaining medical treatment - aligned in support of the family with leading bioethicists who have for two decades argued for the right to end life-sustaining treatment.
What brings together the usually diametrically opposed individuals is opposition to the hospital's position that it really doesn't matter what Helga Wanglie would have wanted.
Hospital medical director Michael B. Belzer says he and the hospital are not arguing that Wanglie's respirator is needed for another patient. And they are not arguing that her care - well over $500,000 in charges thus far, paid by Medicare and private insurance - is too expensive. As they stated their position in a Dec. 5 letter to Oliver Wanglie: "We do not believe that the hospital is obligated to provide inappropriate medical treatment which cannot advance a patient's personal interests."
The Wanglie case "represents a coming full circle," said James Nelson, a philosopher and associate for ethical studies at The Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in Westchester County, N.Y. "The whole movement to wrest decision-making power over life-sustaining technologies out of the hands of physicians and into patients' hands involved a kind of conceptual reorganization of what was going on, from seeing these as medical decisions to seeing them as ones of values involving how patients see their own lives."
"It's ironic," Nelson said, that so soon after the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling that such decisions are "patient-centered, there's an attempt to reconsider them again."
by CNB