It works if you're just mostly dead.
Posted on 12/01/2011 6:34:50 PM PST by Winstons Julia
Wayne and Judy refused to sign. “This is not some dog we’re talking about putting down,” Wayne shouted. “This is our son.” Chris still lived with his parents. He was a good kid, a joker, but bashful, especially around girls. He liked playing basketball and fishing in the pond near his house. He was planning to take over the family repo business when Wayne retired in a few years. Before the A.T.V. accident, he’d never given them much trouble at all. He deserved every chance the hospital could give him. The heart attacks never came. Four days later, Chris woke up.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
A very sad story. Bittersweet situation for this family.
Ping
It works if you're just mostly dead.
I agree.
I watched Zombieland last night. Interesting show.
Does it work on dummycrats?
More apologetics and fuzzy edging to enable torturing patients like Terri Schiavo to death. Congratulations, Jeneen Interlandi, you're now not just a NY Slimes hack, you're also a deliberate enabler of mass murder. Make sure it gets on your resume' - to paraphrase Rahm, you don't want to let any slaughters of the helpless go to waste.
I think I read that differently than you did. It seems like she is describing background.
Amazing how some drugs have such opposite effects on comatose or minimally vegetative patients!
Thank you for posting this, and other articles.
After I read an article, I often look to see who posted it, and often, recently (at least), it has been you!
I remember a vanity the other day when The Mods had taken down a couple of items; I am glad to see you are persevering.
Just my opinion, but there seems to be a lot more signs of stress around here lately. I expect it will get worse; I hope, come next November, folks’ moods will improve.
I don’t believe I would want to live that way. I would not want to be such a burden to my family, either.
That’s kind. Yep... there has been some “drama” regarding my posts ... apparently. People need more fiber in their diets.
Having been dead for a minute or two (cardiac arrest), then in two comas, pneumonia, and brain seizures for 6 days, I awoke without any major damage and started watching Fox TV in order to focus my eyes.
I was literally written off for dead because the doctors thought that my body/brain had suffered too much damage. I was a mess and they still don’t know what caused me to collapse. Fooled them, I did, but I don’t blame them for their diagnosis. I beat long odds with the help of immediate and professional medical help and the prayers of my family.
Each family in this situation will have to make a decision as to when to let a loved one go, but don’t be in too much of a hurry. That’s why I’m still here. My family wasn’t in a hurray.
Good luck to all who have family members in these coma-type conditions. SOme will make it back if you give them enough time.
The doctor was wrong. Their son is alive, not a vegetable, and he will be able to benefit from therapies that are developed in the future.
I don’t understand your reaction. There was nothing in that article that led me to think the writer supported euthanasia for brain-damaged people. On the contrary, the article was written with sympathy, restraint, and grace. The conclusion I had to draw is that pulling the plug would almost always be a bad idea because someone is still in there.
“The conclusion I had to draw is that pulling the plug would almost always be a bad idea because someone is still in there.” That was my impression, too. Perhaps Museum Twenty was correct in that there’s a lot of stress around here lately; sometimes stress causes one to selectively attend.
Au contraire!
This fluidity makes diagnosis a challenge. “If a patient follows every command you give them, you know that,” says Dr. John Whyte, director of the Moss Institute and lead investigator on the zolpidem trial. “If a patient has never, ever followed a command, you know that too. But if you tell a patient to wiggle their finger, and they do it occasionally — which is the case for most of these folks — how do you figure out if that ‘occasionally’ means something or not?”
Whyte has spent his entire career trying to answer this question. His first job after his residency was at a facility with a large number of vegetative patients. While working there, he was struck by the amount of contention over diagnoses. For all their experience with this population, clinicians could not seem to agree on whether any given patient was actually conscious. Family members also argued, with one another and with staff, over the meaning of every wince, twitch and eye flutter.
It turned out that a lot of people — staff members included — were drawing their conclusions from pure coincidence. Whyte told me about one mother who insisted that her son would point down toward his feeding tube to indicate that fluid was leaking onto his stomach, causing irritation. “He did it while I was there,” Whyte says. “And she lifted his shirt and said: ‘See, doctor, there’s the liquid. He’s communicating with us.’ And I said: ‘How often do you look under there when he isn’t pointing like this? Never? Not even once?’ ” It was possible that the pointing corresponded to the leak, Whyte explained. But it was also possible that the leaking was constant and the pointing was random. There were countless other examples. “Behaviors would be exceptions if they happened at the wrong time, and evidence if they happened at the right time,” Whyte says.
To help eliminate this bias, Whyte developed what he calls the single-subject assessment, in which doctors design a set of tests specific to each patient’s idiosyncrasies to determine whether the patient is vegetative or minimally conscious. It is painstaking work, but the information it yields is significant. “Patients who achieve minimal consciousness early tend to have a better prognosis,” Whyte says. “And you can at least try to build a communication system with them, because you have a foundation to work from.”
I had heard about this before when I was doing online research. Two years ago, my sister, at 42, suffered a heart attack. She was down without a heartbeat and not on a respirator for somewhere between 15-20 minutes.
When they finally got her stabilized, the doctors insisted she was in a PVS. But I talked to her husband frequently, and he kept saying he was seeing signs.
One month to the day after it happened she said her first words when she asked for ice cream.
She is still not “all there” and perhaps never will be. She can be very lucid for periods of time and then just lose it and ramble off about something totally unrelated.
But she seems to have escaped the worst. Many patients in that condition are prone to violent episodes because internally, they know what they want, but physically or communication-wise, they cannot express it.
She was always a very positive and easy-going person so I am sure that makes a difference.
Time will tell. But the fact she can speaks and converse and move around shows that a good portion, if not most of her higher brain functions are still there.
She was one very, very, very lucky girl. The heart attack actually happened in the ER!
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