Starvation in perspective

In Southern Sudan, at least 60,000 people died from hunger last year alone, many of them children 2003

One in 10 infants in the former Transkei region die during their first 12 months, chiefly due to starvation, according to a Health Systems Trust study conducted last year; 2004

About 24,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes. 2005

My father had end-stage renal disease. The night his kidneys shut down (13 years ago this July) he also had a heart attack, though the doctors were so busy treating his stopped kidneys that they didn't realize it for a couple of days.

He lived nearly two weeks after that... spent the first days in ICU where he was given the equivalent of 24 Lasix pills via injection several times a day. Nothing worked. Eventually, they moved him to a regular room. Every day, he was slipping away a bit more. At first he could eat a little bit, then started choking on it. So the nurses made certain all his food was pureed. For some reason, he would only take food from me, so I made certain to be at the hospital when dinner was served. Then, he started aspirating the pureed food into his lungs...so they stopped serving him and stuck with the IVs.

One day we moved him to a nursing home. My mother was so distraught that my sister had to take her home while I stayed to deal with the paperwork.

I signed his DNR order at the nursing home, which was in accordance with his living will. It was a very difficult thing to do.He died that night. But it was what he wanted, and I don't regret doing it.

He really said he had no appetite and to please leave him alone. He had just come back from the dialysis clinic, sat down in his chair and died from a heart attack just like your dad except he didn't have go through weeks of dying. If he did, I would have let him go as he wanted to. He did have a durable power of attorney.

He had never been on dialysis (the doctors felt it would be too hard on him and his kidney disease so far gone by the time they discovered it...).

But he would make a face when I tried to feed him, and eventually the nurses told me it would do no good. We knew he was going to die. Really, he surprised everyone by living nearly two weeks after the kidneys shut down.

Sometimes with renal failure, it masks itself as other diseases and they don't recognize the symptons until they run the tests.

And it was discovered by accident.

I am sorry for your loss, Cleita. I know it was recent. My father was nearly 13 years ago.

white phosphorous, cluster bombs, tanks, bradleys, humvees, rifles, bunker busters, cruise missiles, tomahawk missiles, countermeasures, psyops, jeeps, F-16's, F-22's, B-1 bombers, machine guns, artillery, nuclear submarines, ICBM's, CIA mischief, FBI mischief, and cheap unarmored vehicles for our children to run around the globe in.

I must admit, I do not see the logic.

Mr. George Schindler father of Terri Schaivo needs to gather his courage, swallow his pride and call a press conference.

He needs to tell the world that his daughter is in the final stages of her journey to the next world. He needs to tell everyone to go home.

Then Mr. Schindler must exhibit the ultimate in courage and live in living colour on television say. “ Michael Schaivo please forgive a family’s grief and fear for their daughter these many years. Please forgive our intemperate language, wild and unmeant insults and accusations.”

Mr. Schindler should go on to say. “ Please find the courage to allow us Terri’s family, all of us, to reunite with you in love. And stand by together with Terri as she dies. Together we will bury, and grieve together as Terri would have wanted and as she deserves.”

A real father and husband would do this so he could comfort and succour his wife and family and bury his daughter together as a whole and complete family.

Ah… you can tell some folks… just not much.

a school goverment project?

I don't remember the author's name or where I found it.

500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of the U.S. sanctions and the left-over depleted Uranium from Gulf War I.

100,000+ Iraqi civilians have been slaughtered in Gulf War II, including women and children.

100’s-1000’s of innocent Iraqis have been imprisoned, beaten, tortured, sodomized, raped, bludgeoned to death, and murdered in a dozen different ways.

And America weeps not for a half-million Iraqis, but for one American woman.

Indifference brought down the French royalty. Indifference catalyzed a hundred different cultures who contributed to dozens of empires' destruction.

The indifference of America surely will be her destruction, for God does not side - EVER - with the indifferent.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

I forget, who says that people die of starvation all over the world all the time because they are too poor to live. Yet, these monsters who have coopted our money prefer to use it to destroy more people with their wars.

remember the first offer for the tsunami crisis, it pretty much sums up everything that needs to be summed up.

Look at the vets sleeping on the streets, the children in this country with no healthcare, the elderly who cannot afford their medications, the working man, trying to make it on minimum wages... how sad that we cannot stop a few from sowing the seeds of our own destruction.