I don’t mean food. I mean oxygen.
In the clinical world, we call it air hunger – the feeling that we need to breathe in order to hang on to life. I’ve seen it mostly in folks who had severe obstructive lung disease – emphysema mostly but also the occasional asthmatic. Among pediatricians, it is most often seen in patients with cystic fibrosis or some cardio-pulmonary conditions.
I have never felt air hunger, but I do know what it is to feel short of breath. I’m thinking it likely that you too know this uncomfortable feeling. I do not know firsthand, but I imagine that being strangled or suffocated produces a similar sensation – the intense desire/need for oxygen and an attendant feeling of dread or impending doom. It isn’t a pretty picture to contemplate.
I’m dwelling on this morbid notion this evening because of the recent execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith in Alabama using Nitrogen hypoxia as the means of death. Nitrogen makes up about 80% of the air that we breathe. It is essentially inert. The 19-20% of the air that is oxygen is all that we need to escape hypoxic death. So, giving a person nothing but Nitrogen to breathe results in air hunger. The individual feels that he or she is suffocating. The writhing and seizure movements one sees in Nitrogen hypoxic execution are what a person being strangled or suffocated would experience. To describe this is a painless death is bizarre. It takes several minutes to die this way, and one is continuously aware of the encompassing doom – rather like drowning at sea, I suspect.
The much-maligned Dr. Jack Kevorkian used a carbon monoxide generator to assist his terminally ill patients to die. Carbon monoxide asphyxia does not cause air hunger. The person inhaling the gas loses consciousness but without experiencing air hunger and the discomfort of incipient asphyxia. And that, I think, is the correct answer to capital punishment.
I am not advocating for capital punishment; I am simply observing that nitrogen hypoxia is a cruel death when another gas would provide a merciful one.