Word: karens
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Those who knew Karen in the last few months of her active life paint a different picture. Shortly after losing her job, she moved out of her parents' home and into a world of casual employment and even more casual friendships. For a while, she shared a house on a lake with two young men; somewhere along the line, she began experimenting with drugs. Several friends describe her as an occasional marijuana user and frequent pill-popper, who took "uppers" and "downers" to suit her moods...
...probably responsible for her current condition. On April 14, apparently depressed over personal problems, she took some tranquilizers, then went to a bar to celebrate a friend's birthday. After drinking gin and tonic, she began, as one friend put it, "to nod out." Thomas French, 22, helped Karen out of the tavern, then the group took her home and put her to bed, where she passed out. When French looked in on her a few moments later, he realized that she was more than drunk. "I just looked at her and I realized she wasn't breathing...
...while, Karen's parents kept hoping that she would recover. As their testimony in court revealed, Mrs. Quinlan was the first to accept the inevitable, followed shortly after that by her two natural children, Mary Ellen, 19, and John, 17. But Joseph Quinlan kept talking about a miracle. His own parish priest, the Rev. Thomas Trapasso, said, "I was beginning to fear that Joe was not in touch with reality." The priest had to persuade him that Catholic theology does not require that life be preserved indefinitely by artificial and extraordinary means (see box, page 58). In early September...
None of the medical experts held out any hope that Karen could ever recover. Dr. Julius Korein, a neurologist at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, said it most dramatically when he likened Karen to a child without a brain. Karen, he made clear, is not in a "locked-in" syndrome-i.e., a state in which she sees, hears or understands but cannot communicate. She is, said Korein, a vegetable. His description was so disturbing that Mrs. Quinlan, who had maintained her composure throughout the proceedings, slipped quietly from the room...
...Diamond insisted that the machine could not be turned off, for "no physician will ever interrupt a device that is performing lifesaving functions." The experts agreed that despite the seriousness of Karen's condition, she meets none of the accepted criteria for determining death. She has not suffered "brain death," the legal measure of death in eight states-though not New Jersey. An electroencephalograph shows that there is still brain activity. She has, on occasion, breathed spontaneously, for up to half an hour, though most experts doubt that she could do so much longer without...