Unpopular opinion, but nobody can possibly know if Luna suffers or not. I think a lot of the posts on this thread insisting she is not a person and can't feel pain are copes because the alternative is unbearable.
I do feel bad for Luna, I am not heartless. If that were my child, I would have put her in hospice a long time ago and personally, it would upset me but what is the point in keeping her alive? Her condition is terminal regardless, and I do not wish for humans to suffer from such things, which is why I fully believe in euthanasia. She’s not a meat puppet me, but she just sort of exists, if that makes sense. She can’t interact with the world properly, nor develop or grow. That’s not really a life, imho. She’s much like someone in a vegetative state.
As for MCE, you can see what parts of the brain are affected when you look at radiographs. The white and grey matter get replaced by cysts, but that’s not the whole picture. There is the brain stem and such which work minus the corticospinal tract, which does degenerate. And since the brain stem is unaffected, we can surmise that opioid receptors are unaffected as well. There are also case reports/autopsies/other case radiographs to go by
The only thing I’ve disagreed with so far is Luna is totally blind. I don’t believe that to be the case at all. But she does have cortico visual impairment and since she can’t interact with the world, it really doesn’t matter. She can’t do anything with the info.
The brain itself has no pain receptors. That’s why neurosurgery can be done on an awake patient.
As for how we feel pain: messengers transmit a pain signal from the pain receptor to the spinal cord, and then to the thalamus, a region of the brain. The thalamus then transmits the pain signal to other areas of the brain to be processed.
While Luna’s spinal cord is functional, the thalamus is grey matter affected by MCE. So if the thalamus is not working properly, perception of pain is affected.
Multicystic encephalomalacia is a sequelae to global hypoxic ischemic injury which is characterized by cortical atrophy, thalamic atrophy, and cystic necrosis of cerebral white matter.
So if the thalamus is wasting away, pain sensation is going to be reduced or absent.
ETA: she’s five now. She should be walking, talking, growing, learning, making friends etc. She should be entering kindergarten. But she can do none of these things and never will. Sitting around with no awareness to anything just isn’t really a life to me. When we talk about pets, vets ask about quality of life. When your pet is so sick they cant enjoy their life, eat or drink on their own, and can’t interact with their surroundings, the vet says it’s time to let go. It’s acceptable to end life for an animal but when it comes to humans, people get up in arms about euthanasia.
And one last point: the cysts aren’t sitting on top of grey matter, the cysts destroy it. That is what makes it so horrible
