Posted on 12/30/2013 12:15:05 PM PST by Morgana
Children’s Hospital Oakland has a very good reputation where I live in the Bay Area. But its public communication around the tragedy of Jahi McMath’s ”brain death” has been astoundingly insensitive, bordering on arrogant.
The hospital’s statements quoted in today’s San Francisco Chronicle continues the maladroit insensitivity. The hospital states it will remove the ventilator the moment that can be done legally. From the story:
Children’s Hospital Oakland officials confirmed Sunday they will turn off the machines sustaining Jahi McMath’s body as soon as a legal injunction expires at 5 p.m. Monday unless otherwise ordered by a court. “Barring any other court-order legal action by the family, the ventilator will be shut off at 5 p.m. tomorrow,” said hospital spokesman Sam Singer. “It’s tremendously sad, but that’s what’s going to occur.”
Not five minutes after five. Not sometime after five. Not one second after five. At five! I can picture a doctor looking at his watch counting down the seconds, “three, two, one…”.
Then there’s this:
“Children’s Hospital Oakland continues to support the family of Jahi McMath in this time of grief and loss over her death,” the hospital said in a statement Sunday. “We continue to do so despite their lawyer’s criticizing the very hospital that all along has been working hard to be accommodating to this grieving family.”
Gee, that’s big of you. Why have hospital spokespersons acted throughout this sad saga as if the institution is the victim?
I gave another example here the other day, noting that I heard a hospital spokesman on the radio claiming he was “gratified” that the court agreed that Jahi was dead. Gratified?! They should have expresses sorrow that the hospital’s doctors were right. I mean, the “victory” isn’t akin to a judge deciding that their version of a disputed contract clause was correct!
There have been other examples of awful care and handling of the grieving family–such as one doctor “compassionately” telling the family during a meeting that Jahi was, “dead, dead, dead, dead.” From the 12/21/13 Chronicle story:
The ruling comes a day after the girl’s relatives met with hospital officials and said the meeting did not go well. They said a doctor had told them that Jahi is “dead, dead, dead, dead” and that further medical care was no longer needed.
Gee, maybe the doctor could try and understand that a family seeing their beloved girl warm and breathing with a machine, might have a difficult time grasping that clinical determination. Sensitivity, please!
I have covered this story extensively here because of its importance on several levels:
First and foremost is the terrible personal tragedy of a 13-year-old girl going in for minor surgery and dying–illustrating that most medical treatments have potential risks. On the macro level, there is issue of “brain death” being dead, rather than as some misuse the word, unconscious. There is the issue of the distinction between stopping care for a dead patient and forcing the withdrawal of wanted treatment maintaining the life of a living patient because it is supposedly “futile.” (With Obamacare, expect more coercion forcing the sickest patients off of life-extending treatment–not because it isn’t working but because the patient’s life is being maintained when death is what the technocrats want.) There is the exacerbating the distrust minorities have for institutions–and their differing views from the technocracy and general community on fighting death to the bitter end. The way in which hospital spokespersons discussed Jahi’s tragedy publicly also illuminates the arrogance among the technocratic class, who too often lose the forest for the trees when considering how public health policies they advocate impact real families.
So sad. So many lessons to be learned.
Not that this is the same thing, but year after year when I was a small child, the Dr threatened to pull my tonsils, I had a unusual amount of strepth throats they thought.
Each time the Dr said I should have them taken out, I balled my eyes out, each time they said.... well we will put it off for now.
Years later as a adult, a different Dr told me I never had to worry about my tonsils , because they had basically disintegrated .
My point is that they were going to do a totally unnecessary operation on me because it was the thinking of the day
I don’t know anything about sleep apnea, but almost seems its the latest new wave illness
Very unfortunate that they did not leave well enough alone
The poor girl asked that they not do this to her
They can’t take the organs without the parents permission.
“If she is really brain dead....pull the plug and let nature take it’s course....
There is the chance you may breath on her own....it’s happened before...”
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Yes, that (i.e., breathing on her own) can and frequently does happen for patients in a coma or a “persistent vegetative state”. I don’t think it happens for patients once brain death has happened.
First off my first post only said “we are going to have lots of terry schiavos”.
second they said terry was in a vegetative state. she was NOT.
third i dont believe this hospital they are the ones that caused this catastrophe. i side with the parents. they know more than we.
fourth i side with life when i have to decide.
last.. i believe let the parents decide but they should be stepping up to paying for it.
But they can take her off life support without the parents permission...uh huh..this particular hospital would not let parents permission prevent them from removing her organs.
Nobody has ever returned to life after brain death occures. Ever.
Miracles are always possible. I am sure that people have come back from this very thing
When your brain is dead, when electrical activity has ceased, when blood is no longer circulating, when cells break down, putrefaction takes place, brain mass turns to jelly, liquid rotted brain matter leaks out your nose, no, you are not coming back. No one has.
Just off top of my head, Lazarus I believed was brain dead
And how, pray tell, was Lazarus declared brain dead?
Not that this is the same thing, but year after year when I was a small child, the Dr threatened to pull my tonsils, I had a unusual amount of strepth throats they thought.
Each time the Dr said I should have them taken out, I balled my eyes out, each time they said.... well we will put it off for now.
Years later as a adult, a different Dr told me I never had to worry about my tonsils , because they had basically disintegrated .
My point is that they were going to do a totally unnecessary operation on me because it was the thinking of the day
I don’t know anything about sleep apnea, but almost seems its the latest new wave illness
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My daughter was ADHD. Severe. Never slept and a behaviorl problem. Too late I discovered that she snored loudly when she did sleep. She always had tonsils the size of florida. When they shrunk when she was about 10, no ADHD, sound sleep. If they had been removed she would have grown up to be a very different girl.
I had the only dr in my state who refused to remove tonsils. As I aged and the tonsils collapsed I had chronic infected areas in the crypts that developed from the chronic infection. So at my great old age, I had tonsils out last summer. And it was no picnic.
Can you say Terri Schiavo ?
sounds like Jihad to me
Really,they have to get her in a nursing home.
well, of course I am not sure but the family has not been able to produce one neurologist who can declare there is any chance of recovery. Only the family is privy to the state of their daughter’s physical body, though as another poster stated, a corpse on a vent still begins to rot eventually
If the doctors believed they could do a Christ like miracle I am sure the wards would be full of corpses on ventilators, waiting in line
The family hasnt even been able to find a hospice group willing to take this child’s body and keep it oxygenated, which indicates something about her condition
ironically apnea is weight related but also inversely so, the less sleep you get, the more weight you pile on
Have to trust that the doctors who recommended removing her tonsils and adenoids to improve her airways knew her condition better then either of us
go psss up a stump
Thanks for sharing.....Would have been nice though if this sweet little girl had not had hers out
Its a sad situation
“There is the chance you may breath on her own....it’s happened before.”
Yes...I remember Karen Quinlan.
This is a terrible tragedy, but by all modern reckoning, the child is dead.
She would have been declared so 1/2 hour after surgery, 70 years ago.
She went through a sleep study and the physician recommended the tonsillectomy. The family sought a second opinion and the other physician agreed with the recommendation.
Jahi was fine in surgery and in the recovery room.
Due to her morbid obesity, she was scheduled to spend one night in the ICU after surgery, which is not common for a tonsillectomy patient.
After thirty minutes in ICU, Jahi started bleeding profusely. She lost four pints and had four blood transfusions.
Later, in ICU, Jahi's grandmother noticed that Jahi's blood oxygen level was dropping. She alerted the nurses. Jahi went into cardiac arrest. Physician performed heart compressions and tried different blood clotting medicines, none of which worked.
During resuscitation, Jahi lost a lost of oxygen to the brain. The following day, a CT showed that 2/3 of her brain was swollen.
The swelling continued until she was 100% brain dead.
This description comes from Jahi's uncle, Omari Sealey, on a CNN phone interview.
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