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.
Can you say Obamacare?
$$$$$$$$ - that’s basically it.
A very, very sad story. Has anyone determined what went wrong?
If I’m brain dead then let my body go, for I am already gone.
Well said. Their reputation suffers every time they speak. They must have gone to the Harry Reed school of public relations.
I read in another story she started bleeding, which led to her heart stopping and then brain damage.
Apparently these surgeries are risky for older children and adults.
Sadly, last week I posted on this and a lot of Freepers were on the train. They were angry to suggest that the hospital or government would be questioned or they would ever do anything wrong.
I hate this to be political but when the doc in chief, Obama, has no problem defining when a life is no longer worth sustaining (take a pill) this is no surprise. Then there was the Terry Shaivo case where people were actively fighting to kill her and claimed it was a pleasant experience when they dehydrated her to death.
I$ her heart in good $hape? What about her lung$. Kidney$? Liver part$?
Now why would they want to pull the plug? $$$$
btt
Gonna be lots of terry schiavos.
It should be legal for the healthy to sell their own organs.
I stood outside her nursing home. it was horrible what they did to her. special place in hell for her ex , his lawyers and the judge.
I think that’s the whole point of the charade. As I understand it, the girl was in there for an operation to correct snoring due to obesity. That a doctor suggested that avenue (surgery) over the route of a strict regimen to correct the underlying cause seems questionable in the least.
They should have just given her a C-pap.
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...
“We bury our mistakes!”
Organ harvest.
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