Posted on 12/30/2013 8:55:21 AM PST by Morgana
FULL TITLE: Jahi McMath: Mom and lawyer say only remaining option for brain-dead girl is a New York care facility
OAKLAND -- A Los Angeles-area long-term care facility that had been willing to accept Jahi McMath has withdrawn its offer, leaving a New York hospital as the only apparent option for the brain-dead girl as a 5 p.m. Monday deadline to remove her from a ventilator approaches, her mother and attorney said Sunday.
"I just found out that the facility my daughter was supposed to be going to has backed out," Jahi's mother, Nailah Winkfield, wrote on the family's fundraising website early Sunday. "My family and I are still striving to find a location that will accept her in her current condition."
That leaves an unnamed New York hospital "as our last, last hope," Jahi's lawyer, Christopher Dolan, said. The facility is run by an "organization that believes in life," Dolan told The Associated Press.
But in a statement issued Sunday, a spokeswoman for Children's Hospital Oakland said its doctors said no one from any other medical organization has been in contact with it to discuss a transfer of the 13-year-old.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
prolife ping!!
I’m sure the hospital will keep her hooked up for as long as the family can pay cash for her.
What insurance do they have? Does it matter?
Looks some henbane money is doin’ some politickin’
Why on earth can’t they take the child home and be put on a ventilator? I am sure this can be done. It seems to me they’d be more than willing to care for her at home.
They should score her an obama-phone so she can call home after 7 and on weekends.
Have they tried the Jefferson Institute?
She's not in a coma. She's dead. Her parents are in denial.
I believe she would also need a feeding tube or she would starve to death and the surgeons at the hospital are refusing to put one in…this is part of the reason the nursing homes can’t take her.
I am also guessing the hospital and MD’s are refusing referrals to home health that would be needed in order to teach the family how to care for her.
This is such a sad story. I hope the family has their own spiritual counsel.
So this is not a case like Terri Shaivo?
No. Schiavo wasn't declared "brain dead" but rather in a "persistent vegetative state." There's a big difference.
This girl is dead. Her brain is decomposing.
It’s not that easy to provide such care at home. I expect the girl would still need round the clock professional nursing and that’s not cheaper or any more practical than a nursing home or hospital. Plus all the equipment — the family might not have enough room for all the paraphernalia.
If she were dead, the ventilator would be useless and she’d be decomposing.
I don’t think that is accurate. I believe that many people who die in Hospitals could be kept alive on ventilators indefinitely. As long as they are “breathing” and their blood circulates, their bodies will not decompose.
And disallow the possibility of a miracle?
It would be a miracle if a dead person NOT on a ventilator were to come back to life; would you say that such dead bodies shouldn’t be buried because burial would “disallow the possibility of a miracle”?
Well, by that logic, turn off the ventilator, because maybe a miracle will occur and she will keep breathing. There is no brain activity at all. Usually the reason they keep the body breathing even after the brain is dead is that if the family wants to donate the organs, if they are not oxygenated, they are not able to be donated.
Let her soul go in peace, if it is still with her body.
It is a horrible thing to lose a child, but keeping her on a machine is only prolonging what should come naturally. Her parents are in denial, which I understand and sympathize with, but when all natural body functions cease give them the time to say goodbye with it but then allow her to go.
At any other time in human history this child would have been gone, only in the last eye blink of our being have we been able to sustain a body past its time like this.
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