An end-of-life expert faces the ethical questions she studies when her husband becomes paralyzed

From the intro to an extended feature in Salt Lake Tribune in Utah:

The moment Brooke Hopkins' heart stopped beating, Peggy Battin found herself in a scene whose ending she had written time and again.

Doctors, nurses and aides swarmed Hopkins' hospital bed, urgently working to save his life. Battin watched in horror as his eyes rolled back and his face grew ashen. A burly aide screamed at her to get out, but she didn't budge. She couldn't leave her husband of more than 20 years. Not now. Not ever. (The couple is pictured.)

"Oh, my God," she thought. "This could be it."

It was a time of decision and pain that Battin had described often through decades of studying the issue of death. Beginning in the 1970s, she was a pioneer in the field of medical ethics, specializing in end-of-life questions. Suicide.

Euthanasia. Do Not Resuscitate orders. When and how to die. These were the knotty subjects she debated and discussed in the classroom and courtroom.

Yet it was always about other cases, other people, other situations.

In one unexpected episode in City Creek Canyon on an ordinary November weekday, Battin's personal and professional lives collided.

She knew by heart the arguments for not resuscitating fatally injured patients. She had defended vigorously a person's right to be the final architect of his own death. Yet she also knew her husband well enough to believe he would want to live even if completely paralyzed. But what if he hadn't? Could she have signed a do-not-resuscitate order? Or worse, if he asked her to help him end his life, could she have done it?

Hopkins' life-altering accident on Nov. 14, Battin says, "has presented me more than an intellectual challenge to the views I've been defending over the years. It is a deeply personal, profoundly self-confronting challenge."

Michael Battin has witnessed his mother's metamorphosis.

"Not a single part of her world is the same as it was six months ago," he says. "It is the most fantastic irony you could imagine."