“I complete one every day.”
“I’m not your enemy, Billy.”
“It’s hard to tell around this time of the year.”
Ferrier was a hard-working physician, intelligent, talented, and wellmeaning. Unfortunately, the university that turned him out had infected him with what they called “utilitarian ethics.”
“She’s gotten no better,” said Dr. Ferrier.
“She’s gotten no worse, either.”
“Any chance of her regaining high cognitive function—”
“Sometimes she talks,” Billy interrupted. “You know she does.”
“Does she ever make sense? Is she coherent?”
“Once in a while,” Billy said.
“Give me an example.”
“I can’t, offhand. I’d have to check my notebooks.”
Ferrier had soulful eyes. He knew how to use them. “She was a wonderful woman, Billy. No one but you had more respect for her than I did. But now she has no meaningful quality of life.”
“To me, it’s very meaningful.”
“You’re not the one suffering. She is.”
“She doesn’t seem to be suffering,” Billy said.
“We can’t really know for sure, can we?”
“Exactly.”
Barbara had liked Ferrier. That was one reason Billy did not replace him. On some deep level she might perceive what was happening around her. In that event, she might feel safer knowing she was being cared for by Ferrier instead of by a strange doctor whom she’d never met.
Sometimes this irony was a grinding wheel that sharpened Billy’s sense of injustice to a razor’s edge.
Had she known about Ferrier’s bioethics infection, had she known that he believed he possessed the wisdom and the right to determine whether a Down’s Syndrome baby or a handicapped child, or a comatose woman, enjoyed a quality of life worth living, she might have changed physicians. But she had not known.
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“She was such a vibrant, involved person,” Ferrier said. “She wouldn’t want to just hang on like this, year after year.”
“She’s not just hanging on,” Billy said. “She’s not lost at the bottom of a sea. She’s floating near the surface. She’s right there.”
“I understand your pain, Billy. Believe me, I do. But you don’t have the medical knowledge to assess her condition. She’s not right there. She never will be.”
“I remember something she said just the other day. ‘I want to know what it says… the sea, what it is that it keeps on saying.’”
Ferrier regarded him with equal measures of tenderness and frustration.
“That’s your best example of coherence?”
“ ‘First do no harm,’” Billy said.
“Harm is done to other patients when we spend limited resources on hopeless cases.”
“She’s not hopeless. She laughs sometimes. She’s right there, and she’s got plenty of resources.”
“Which could do so much good if properly applied.”
“I don’t want the money.”
“I know. You’re not the kind of guy who could ever spend a dime of it on yourself. But you could direct those resources to people who have a greater potential for an acceptable quality of life than she does, people who would be more likely to be helped.”
Billy tolerated Ferrier also because the physician had been so effective in pre-trial depositions that the maker of the vichyssoise had chosen to settle long before getting near a courtroom.
“I’m only thinking of Barbara,” Ferrier continued. “If I were in her condition, I wouldn’t want to lie there like that, year after year.”
“And I would respect your wishes,” Billy said. “But we don’t know what her wishes are.”
“Letting her go doesn’t require active steps,” Ferrier reminded him. “We need only be passive. Remove the feeding tube.”
In her coma, Barbara had no reliable gag reflex and could not properly swallow. Food would end up in her lungs.
“Remove the feeding tube and let nature take its course.”
“Starvation.”
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