Two Arms, One Head

[Garnet]

I'm not really sure where to post this. Mods, please move it if appropriate. Apostate Abe posted this over at FRDB and I thought I'd share it here:

A few years ago, my friend got into a motorcycle accident while on his way to South America, and he became a paraplegic. He spent over a year without control or sensation from the chest down. And, he ended it by putting a knife in his unfeeling useless corpse and bleeding out.

I use that language because the language my friend used was even more odious. Just before he died, he wrote a book on his laptop titled Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher. He wrote a note asking the book to be distributed to many of the people he loved.

Now I am giving it to the world. I put it on the web. Here it is:

www.2arms1head.com

It is possibly both the most disturbing and enlightening book you will ever read, and I am not one for exaggeration.

I can't read this yet, if at all, because of some junk in my attic. To be honest, I'm not sure I'll even be able to participate in this thread even though I'm starting it. Nevertheless, I think it's worth sharing.

[davidpbrown]

Thanks for posting. That's tough reading and very powerful.

I'm not sure I can read it all as it's highly emotive but reading key parts, it's particularly interesting for the move from the stress, through frustration, to the honest confrontation.

I want to escape from the truth that I have to die. I am very scared and desperate.

I’m scared and just don’t want to die alone. Is that so much to ask? Why is there so much denial everywhere? We all have to die, why can we not help those who have decided they are ready?

We spend so much time fearing things but then when we are face-to-face with them we find we had nothing to fear all along.

[Rie]

And if he'd just had someone to talk with :sadyes: I work with a former rugby star who now is in a wheelchair . It happened 18 years ago and I value his frienship so much. I prepare the studio for him to take over from me for his shift on air and he wheels his chair up to the console, arm braces on , and all the listener knows is that he has a good voice for radio.

If your poor poor lost friend could have talked to him ApostateAbe... maybe it would have helped. I have often thought that I couldn't do it... come to terms with a disability but my radio jock friend has.

[Free in Freeport]

I believe suicide was a rational but sad choice. Too bad he had to use such a horrendous method and die alone.

:(

[Politesse]

He was not even remotely given the care he needed after his accident...

[MattShizzle]

Can't really blame him. I have about 6 attempts under my belt and hadn't been in that situtation.

[DMB]

He was not even remotely given the care he needed after his accident...

What kind of care do you mean? He was living independently. holding down a job and seeing a psychiatrist. What care do you think he needed that would have improved things?

[DMB]

Here is what he had to say:

I had just about everything possible. I was a student at one of the best law schools in the country, surrounded by people that would have done anything for me. I absolutely believe this. People went to extraordinary lengths to encourage and support me and would have gone further. If a cure came along and it cost $1,000,000, people would have raised it for me. I honestly believe that if I had really needed some kind of accommodation at school men with tools and jackhammers and concrete trucks would have appeared more or less immediately to give it to me. There was money, psychological counseling, tutoring, medical insurance, physical therapy, and every kind of imaginable support abundantly available to me. People encouraged me, praised me, hugged me, loved me, and told me they would do anything for me. And I believed them.

I am young, strong, extremely intelligent, and generally far more capable than the vast majority of paraplegics. No doubt there are some I could never match in certain respects, but I nonetheless believe I can do more or less anything that any other paraplegic can. Others will of course question this and there is no way to prove it, but that in part is the point: I need a reason to prove it. I imagine the following offer: “If you wheel your chair around the world, at the end you will be miraculously and instantaneously healed.” People can think what they want, but I would leave immediately without a second thought. I would stuff my backpack full of catheters and shit-digging gloves, put on some warm clothes, and call my Grandma and the girl I love to tell her what I was doing. I would promise to write often. Then I would roll out the door. I have tremendous respect, as I have said, for Rick Hansen and do not pretend rolling around the world would be easy or that I could do it as admirably as he did, but I would try or die.

I know I can have a house, a car, a wife, kids, a lucrative career, and so on. What is left of my personality is still sufficiently attractive to make people love me and they would get behind me every step of the way through life. Let nobody ever think they let me down or could have done more for me. Anyone who was part of my life and is ever troubled by such thoughts should remember the following: “If you throw someone a life preserver and they turn around and swim away from it, what can you do but let them drown themselves?” No, I had everything possible and in fact die with many unpaid debts of gratitude, so I ask forgiveness for that. Thank you friends. You were wonderful to me.


The care he wanted, and which IMO would be available in a civilised society, was help to die a humane and dignified death.

[Notta]

I read that entire thing at once, and I still think about it. He was a strong, passionate person who saw through the bullshit about having a high quality of life after becoming paralyzed. It was not the quality HE would accept.

His comments about the man he met who was just a 'head' -- a total quadriplegic -- were tragic.