The Army, to its credit, tells the story of a middle-aged lieutenant colonel who had served multiple combat tours and was suffering the agonizing effects of traumatic brain injury and dementia.
Patients with the most agonizing injuries, such as brain damage or permanent disfigurement, lose out more than those with lesser injuries.
Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old terminally ill woman who inspired the passage of California's new medical aid-in-dying law, and I both suffered from deadly brain tumors that caused convulsions and agonizing headaches.
It doesn't help that Matt, despite all the agonizing symptoms the movie takes pains to list -- brain tumors, seizures and the like -- looks almost radiant during the celebration.
With its shadowy re-creations of agonizing illness and horror-movie animations of worms invading every part of the human body (including the brain), it reinforces a trend on Animal Planet and its sister channel Discovery: the depiction of the natural world in terms of violence, threat, warfare and paranoia.
My brain would then remind me of how cancer patients are more than willing to endure agonizing treatments just to get a shot at life.
Cushing, for one, often used only the local anesthetic Novocain.(The brain itself does not have pain receptors, but having one's skull cut open must have been agonizing).
In a debate that was highly emotional and personal, Peter Costello, the country's treasurer, broke with Mr. Howard, voting for the bill after recounting how he had confronted an agonizing decision many years ago over whether to abort his wife's pregnancy, when she was unconscious with a brain tumor.
Brain death is one of the most difficult concepts that families and health-care providers deal with in medicine, suspending everyone involved in an agonizing purgatory.
