DAY 37 FASTING IS TAKING A TOLL

ACTIVISTS FOR HOMELESS WEAKEN, REFUSE TREATMENT

Carol Fennelly, a moving force behind the District's Community for Creative Non-Violence shelter, was bedridden yesterday on the 37th day of a water-only fast after a doctor said that her health had deteriorated to a "life-threatening" condition.

Fennelly, 39, described as the most seriously ill of nine CCNV fasters, said she planned to continue the fast as long as she could and did not want medical treatment for the low blood potassium level that the doctor said places her in danger of heart failure.

Another faster, Steve Sonnone, 50, a handicapped and homeless man from Hartford, Conn., also was declared to be in danger from fasting. Sonnone, who was said to have been malnourished at the start of the fast, also is suffering from low potassium, according to the doctor.

Sonnone said he planned to fast till the end of the 48-day action, on Election Day.

Dr. Janelle Goetcheus, a family practitioner on the staff of Providence Hospital who treats indigent patients at homeless shelters, said she had examined Fennelly and Sonnone but cannot intervene to improve their conditions against their will.

Mitch Snyder, CCNV's founder, who also is fasting, said he and the rest are fully prepared to watch their colleagues die, if it comes to that.

The group is fasting, in particular, to protest funding cuts in government housing programs and, in general, to draw attention to the plight of the homeless.

Snyder, who has fasted numerous times to achieve his group's ends, acknowledged that many would consider the fast extreme. "Yeah, it's nuts," he said.

"It's nuts that people have to do this in order to get housing for people and shelter for people."

During a bedside interview yesterday, Fennelly, who has two teen-age children and who is Snyder's longtime companion, said she did not plan to die.

"I promised my kids that I am not going to die," said Fennelly, who shares a house in Northwest Washington with homeless people. "I don't think it's going to come to that."

"I'm taking it one day at a time. I think I can go the duration," she said.

Fennelly, who is 5 feet 5 inches tall, started the fast weighing 143 pounds. Yesterday her weight was at 108 pounds.

Goetcheus, who announced Fennelly and Sonnone's deteriorating health at a news conference, said Fennelly's potassium count had dropped to 2.3 milliequivalents per liter of blood, well below the normal range of 3.5 to 5.4 per liter. Fennelly said she also was anemic before starting the fast.

Sonnone's potassium count has dropped to 2.6 and he has lost 37 pounds. Sonnone also is arthritic and suffers from a spinal abnormality caused by an accident. And because he lived on the streets and ate only sporadically, he was severely undernourished, the doctor said.

While Goetcheus said she could not predict exactly what turn the two fasters' health would take, she said that low potassium levels in the blood can lead to heart dysfunctions such as fibrillation or cardiac arrest, and possibly death. Other doctors who are not involved with the fasters also said that low potassium could lead to cardiac abnormalities.

"There's no way to predict when that potassium begins to fall when that heart is going to go into an irregular rhythm and it could happen at any time," Goetcheus said.

"They are not requesting any intervention at all in terms of treatment."

Of the ethical dilemma posed by the fasters' health, Goetcheus said, "I think what I must do is just be there and be available if they wish anything done. As I say, I experience on a daily basis being with {homeless} patients who are needlessly dying and so I understand why the fasters have chosen to take this way."

The only way a patient can be compelled to undergo treatment he or she does not want is if that patient is declared incompetent by a court, said Dr. Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center, a research and education organization in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., specializing in medical ethics.

"Obviously, it's a classic dilemma," Callahan said. "On the one hand, physicians are obligated to care for the welfare of patients. On the other hand, patients have a right to refuse treatment, if they are competent."

Sonnone, who rides in a wheelchair each day to the CCNV-sponsored protests on the steps of the Capitol, said it is not his intention to die.

"I've been very fortunate to be alive up until this point," he said. "I have no death wish, but I am committed to the movement and the cause . . . . "

Fennelly appeared extremely weak, but lucid. She complained of instances of memory lapse. Her mother in Los Angeles, she said, does not know of the fast.

She said that her children, particularly her 17-year-old son, James, who attends Archbishop Carroll High School, had urged her to eat.

"'Why don't you eat. Damn it, eat dinner with me,' " she recalled James saying.

But she will not eat, opting instead to lie there in bed barely able to pour water for herself from a bottle, barely able to breathe when she lies on her side, and suffering from dehydration every morning.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.