It is not hard to imagine that he might object. Surely his family would violently object. There is much talk nowadays of flat EEG's. The machines that go beep in the night are supposed to tell us when brains die, and we, the children of technology, are supposed to believe them when they do. But we don't.
Doctors are still old-fashioned in many ways.
They have an innate distrust of those machines that say the brain is dead, dead, dead, and going to stay dead. As one neurosurgeon said to me recently, you only have to see one patient who had a flat EEG wake up and walk away to know that the machines are not always right. An article in a prestigious medical journal warns doctors to be careful what they say around comatose patients. It is a supreme irony that The Institutes, which has for so long championed the right of the individual to be aroused from a coma, should now find that before that right can be addressed we must first insure the right of the individual to be in a coma. For if this present trend continues to its illogical extreme, coma will be a thing of the past.