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Posted on 02/02/2015 3:30:36 PM PST by wagglebee
CORPUS CHRISTI, TX, February 2, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- A 12-year-old Texas boy who slipped into a coma after suffering a severe asthma attack has begun breathing on his own – just hours after hospital officials fought to take him off life support because they believed he was legally “brain dead.” Now, his family has obtained a court order requiring the hospital to provide nourishment to the boy via a feeding tube, and hope to have him transferred to another facility within the week.
Joey Cronin has been at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi since January 14, when he suffered cardiac arrest as a result of an asthma attack. In an interview last week with LifeSiteNews, Joey’s father George Cronin said that hospital staff were pessimistic about his chances of recovery from the very start, even though early on, Joey was showing signs of awareness – opening his eyes, gripping his parents’ hands, and responding to external stimuli.
“They were very negative,” Cronin told LifeSiteNews last week. “On the night he came in, they told me it could be a matter of hours before they would have to [remove Joey from life support].” However, the testing the hospital did to prove Joey was brain dead showed he was responsive, so they were forced to honor the Cronins’ wishes to keep the boy on his ventilator. But they refused to install a feeding tube so that he could receive nutrition.
When Joey slipped into a coma several days later, the hospital became more aggressive in its push to have the boy declared brain dead – the legal threshold for issuing a death certificate in Texas. With a death certificate, the hospital could remove Joey from life support against his parents’ wishes. Under advice from a local attorney, the Cronins refused to give consent for any further testing. They then sought help from Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal defense group. Their only goal was to force the hospital to keep Joey alive until he could be transferred safely to another hospital – one that would give him lifesaving treatment without giving up on him.
At least one facility in Houston had already agreed to take Joey in, and another in New Jersey was open to the possibility. But the biggest question in the Cronins’ mind was whether Driscoll Children’s would give Joey the care he needed to stay strong enough for transfer. They reached out via news and social media, begging people to contact the hospital to urge them not to give up on Joey’s care.
Late last Friday, attorneys with ADF successfully obtained a court order forcing the hospital to provide a feeding tube and nutrition for Joey.
The decision came just in time: Within hours, the boy surprised everyone by chewing on his ventilator tube – a clear sign of life. The hospital immediately gave him a tracheostomy so that he could breathe on his own without damaging his throat. Not long after that, he was wiggling his toes.
Now, his parents hope that he will be transferred to another facility by midweek.
“They said he’s pretty much ready any day now,” Cronin told LifeSiteNews by telephone Monday. “So we’re hoping it’s not going to be very much longer.”
The Cronins have health insurance, but it’s unclear how much of Joey’s care – especially his transfer – will be covered by their policy. Meanwhile, George Cronin has had to take an unpaid leave of absence from his job in order to be at Joey’s bedside. The family is asking for donations to be sent via PayPal to [email protected].
They are also asking that people with awareness of facilities outside of Texas that may be able to treat Joey reach out to them (interested parties can do so by contacting the author of this article at [email protected]) because they would prefer to have their son cared for in a state that does not define brain death as legal death.
Since Joey’s turnaround, George Cronin reports that Driscoll Children’s has become much more supportive regarding his care. “Everything’s fine; they’re cooperating with us now,” Cronin told LifeSiteNews. “We don’t want to paint them as the bad guys.”
Blogger Charlie Johnston, who first brought LifeSiteNews’s attention to the case, said Driscoll Children’s initial insistence upon pushing for a diagnosis of brain death is less an indictment of the hospital itself than of the culture in which it operates.
“I think an important thing to remember is that Driscoll was not the cause of this situation, but is instead a symptom of where we have arrived,” Johnston wrote in an update Saturday. “They exercised a lot of what are now standard medical protocols. Alas, we really have to take a hard look at whether those protocols are genuinely giving medical professionals information, or whether they are just props to justify premature declarations of death.”
“Certainly, when Joey started showing important and genuine signs of independent life … the people at the hospital entirely changed their outlook to one of helping treat the boy,” Johnston added. “This could have happened at almost any hospital in America today except some religiously affiliated ones that actually take that religious affiliation seriously.”
“As the comic character, Pogo, once famously said, ‘We have met the enemy – and he is us,’” Johnston added. “It is a change of heart in our culture and faith that is necessary to put an end to the sort of assumptions that make crises like these possible.”
Johnston encouraged those who contacted the hospital last week to contact them again to thank them for taking good care of Joey since the court stepped in.
“It would not hurt at all – and might be a great help – for all those who called the hospital before to call them now,” Johnston said. “Tell them you know what an intense week it has been and thank them for giving such effective care after having had such a tense week.”
Driscoll Children’s Hospital can be reached at (361) 694-5000.
No 'potential recipients' should know about this kid. Not yet, anyhow.
Praise God!
Prayers answered.
yep, they purposely misuse the word “organ”. Organ donor means your entire body. I was always suspicious of the rush to declare someone dead for the organs. I NEVER put it on my license. I was right to be suspicious. The things my family and esp. MYSELF for being a whistleblower had to go through. These people are sick. They hide behind the true goodness that can come from INFORMED DONATION and use the “OPRAH FEEL GOOD” to cover up. I was going to do a live kidney donation (I was researching it to help someone (anyone)) and then I read that you have to go through the ghouls that run the sick bunch that I came across. No way in hell unless I deal with an upfront, honest, non-cruel, other State Designated “Organ Procurement” organization. I have a long, horrid story about what happened. I did do good to stop it (or try) but it’s still going on. And those that try to stop it, get threatened by lawsuits. If these people actually ran a business, especially one that has to do what they do, in a time of family sorrow, they wouldn’t have run it the way they did. TOTALLY UP FRONT AND HONEST SHOULD BE THEIR ORGANIZATION’S VALUES AND MISSION, instead liars and thugs hiding behind what good is done. Like I said, I have told my kids, and they were old enough unfortunately to experience (see) what happened and they know that NOT ONE PIECE of me goes through that organization. Period.
This young man was hours away from being taken off life support, sans one doctor who had seen/felt something. (intution?)
Fully recovered University of Arizona student.
http://news.yahoo.com/arizona-coma-patient-now-speaking-walking-202509216.html
Brain Death is NOT settled science. Esp. drug overdose patients need at least 24 hours if not a few days more. They can actually come out of brain swelling from drugs unscathed.
Hopefully once “organs” can be grown from ADULT stem cells, these HUGE MONEY MAKING “non-profits” and their “for profit” siblings, will go nearly extinct and with that, their unsavory and illegal underbelly of body parts theft.
If you were one of the “other people” would you want them to kill off a twelve year old so you could have some parts? Even if they were life saving parts?
When my friends donated their son's, he was kept on machines until there was ZERO brain activity...3 or 4 days. They can't turn a machine off and start harvesting parts.
The parents of the child I'm familiar with who had double lung transplant, pray for the parents of the "angel" donor everyday...always mindful that they lost a child
Your argument is ignorant.
I was discussing the child in the news story, who woke back up and the hospital was trying to turn off his machine. The donation of parts from families whose loved has actually died can be a wonderful thing.
But the killing of a child so the hospital can harvest the parts is abominable. And once the hospital gets the parents to “approve” the turning off of the machines, then they can push the next part, getting the approval for donating the body. Once they get that approval, they don’t turn off the machines till they get everything they want.
The ignorance is that you accuse me of “ignorance” when you do not know the whole process. I have been through the beginning stages of that process, but my Lord and Savior decided to give us our daughter back. Being in a military hospital at the time, they did not care about the niceties, just stated that if we wanted to donate her, then they would go through the process, no trickery.
Civilian hospitals seem to use the trickery part, hoping to slide the parents from one stage to another without much fight. These parents fought and will get their child back.
You're assuming a lot.
1. That the info given is accurate.
2. That this hospital does organ transplants.
It doesn’t matter if they do organ transplants, there are doctors who will travel to get what they need for their own patients.
But I do agree about whether or not the info is accurate. I made an assumption, and said so, that I think the hospital might have an ulterior motive for proclaiming the child dead before he really was. I do not know if this is the truth or not.
Of course hospitals travel to get matching donor parts. But the insinuation made here was that hospitals unplug people so they can make $$$ transplanting body parts. What would the odds be that a hospital would have a matching recipient waiting? Asinine thinking, IMO.
BTW, I appreciate your polite comment.
I have heard it is the legal threshold for several states now...amazing. The medical knowledge is just not there to declare brain death to begin with so whatever your spiritual beliefs we should not be going in this direction. Many people have been declared to be in a permanent vegetative state or brain dead that recover. When they do recover the statement is always that they were misdiagnosed. The truth is we know so little about the brain we should not be trying to choose death based on that knowledge.
The hospital was following the law. Many laws have been written that cause these things to happen, we need to stand up to the death culture before it is too late. If it is not already too late.
Yes, big HCA hospitals turn away Medicaid patient but as soon as she is in a coma, they let her back in and bother her daughter about donating my friends’ eyes. Big HCA hospital, you didn’t care about her until you wanted to steal her eyes.
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