Jeanetta links to this amazing story about a Boston woman who, in 1985, woke up from a coma to find that her husband, a physician, was trying to pull the plug on her:
At that meeting, my then-husband, who was a doctor siding with the other doctor who wanted to let me die, held that clipboard which was my lifeline up in the air in
front of me. He was not going to make it easy.
The purpose was to prove that the nurses were basically hallucinating and that I was
really and truly brain-dead.
To prove I could not communicate, he then put ink on my fingers and asked while laughing, “There isn’t anything you want to tell us, is there?”
In response I spelled out, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E Y-O-U!” The laughter got very nervous then. The doctors called for medication because I was obviously having a seizure….
It is appalling how much prejudiced doctors (and others) will rationalize away as “primitive brain stem activity” and “seizures.”