Judge Grants Request From Jahi McMath’s Family to Extend Life Support

The judge who is adjudicating the case of the family of the teenage girl in California who is the subject of a national debate over whether a hospital has the right to yank life support has granted an extension.

A county judge extended the order for the hospital to keep Jahi McMath on life support until 5 p.m. on January 7. Her mother and family say she is alive.

Jahi’s family has a door-to-door ambulance flight contracted to take her to a New York facility that will care for her.

“The family has located a licensed facility in the state of New York which has agreed to take Jahi,” Jahi’s uncle, Omari Sealey, said Monday afternoon, only about an hour before an Alameda County judge’s order keeping the girl on a ventilator was set to expire. “We have contracted with an air ambulance willing to take her from door to door. We have a doctor here in California who will be with her throughout the transfer.”

“Jahi is moving when her mother speaks,” he said. “We have video our attorneys have just produced it to the hospital’s attorney. We have a pediatrician who has seen Jahi who has sworn that she is not dead. We are hopeful that one of these (legal) actions will forestall the hospital’s rush to extinguish Jahi’s chance at life.”

Meanwhile, just three hours before the deadline, the girl’s grandmother, Sandra Chapman spoke to the media and suggested Jahi was moving her body, saying there was leg and body movement as well as response to touch and voice.

“I know one’s [an alternative care facility] gonna come through. I know it. I feel it. Jahi’s moving. If she’s moving, the doctor should pay attention to that,” she said.

Jahi McMath’s family had found a new care facility that will continue her medical care and treatment. But the hospital she is at now won’t cooperate to move her.

A judge had ruled that a hospital in Oakland, California can remove life support from Jahi McMath, 13, who has been declared brain-dead days after undergoing surgery to have her tonsils removed. Her family is already devastated enough but has had to fight the hospital, which wanted to take her off life support against their wishes.

On Thursday, the lawyer for the family, Christopher Dolan, asked Children’s Hospital of Oakland to cooperate by performing a few procedures needed to move Jahi McMath. The hospital said no.

The Los Angeles-area long-term care facility that had been willing to accept Jahi has withdrawn its offer, leaving a New York hospital as the only apparent option for. That is happening as a deadline of 5 p.m. today reaches, whereby the hospital will officially cut offer her life support.

“I just found out that the facility my daughter was supposed to be going to has backed out! Children’s hospital has once again interfered with the placement of my daughter we still have a chance at 1 more facility so let us all pray,” family member Latasha Nailah Winkfield said.

“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.

“Our physicians have yet to receive a single call or message from the facility under consideration,” Cynthia Chiarappa wrote. “We have been waiting since Friday — when we were first told by the family lawyer of a potential facility that might accept the body of Jahi — for a call from a physician to discuss with our medical staff what may be necessary to transfer the deceased.”

Dolan said the unnamed Los Angeles-area facility withdrew its offer because it didn’t want media attention or to jeopardize its relationship with its doctors, who refused to treat someone who’s been declared brain dead.

As Jahi’s family prepared for a Sunday afternoon fundraiser at an Oakland church to help pay for a possible airlift, it remained unclear what will happen in the hours ahead.

Doctors at Children’s Hospital have refused to perform a tracheotomy for breathing and insert a gastric tube for feeding, procedures that are needed in order to transfer Jahi, saying it is unethical to perform surgery on a deceased person.

Jahi’s family is raising funds for her support. You can help by going to www.gofundme.com/jahi-mcmath

Jahi arrived at the hospital on a Monday and was supposed to be released Tuesday, the family said. A member of Jahi’s family , a veteran nurse at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, noticed her granddaughter was bleeding from her mouth and nose. She later went into cardiac arrest. Jahi spent Tuesday on a ventilator. By 2 a.m. Wednesday, doctors said she had swelling in her brain, and Thursday, she was declared legally brain-dead, family members said.

Judge Evelio Grillo ruled that Jahi must be kept on the breathing machine until at least 5 p.m. December 30. The verdict came after hearing testimony from two doctors, one an independent expert appointed by the judge on Monday and the other a 30-year veteran of the hospital. Both testified that the teen is brain-dead and that her body is alive only because of a ventilator hooked up to her since December 12.

The family has appealed the decision but pro-life attorney Wesley Smith said it is unlikely they will prevail.

“The judge gave the family, still fighting the determination, until Monday to appeal or adjust to the tragic reality,” he said. “I hope the family spends the remaining time loving Jahi and making preparations, as there is zero chance in my view that the court’s ruling will be overturned on appeal. If a miracle is to happen, it will have to be when the breathing assistance is removed. People who are brain dead have no ability to breathe on their own.”

“It’s also a shame the hospital has handled the tragedy so maladroitly. I was speaking about this to a former pediatric nurse who used to work in Children’s Hospital Oakland’s ICU. She said the facility has a real calling to serving the African-American community, and this has hurt trust. That’s why I was upset to hear a hospital spokesman say he was “gratified” that the court validated the hospital’s diagnosis,” Smith continued. “No, the proper and decent thing would have been to say that they were sorry the original diagnosis was affirmed. Good grief.”

I'm trying to figure out why they had pictures of her in the hospital BEFORE the surgery. And the operation was to relieve a sleep apnea problem....not tonsillitis. I'm betting this kid had a lot of problems.

Contrary to what has been reported and often repeated by the MSM, this was not just a “simple routine tonsillectomy”.

“Doug Straus said this case is not about a “routine” tonsillectomy. He said the surgery was complicated from the beginning, as three procedures were being done simultaneously. The three surgeries, according to court documents, were: an adenotonsillectomy; a uvulopalatopharyngloplasty, or UPPP, which is tissue removal in the throat; and submucous resection of bilateral inferior turbinates, which is nasal obstruction.” (deviated septum, i.e. nasal surgery.)

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Judge-Orders-Oakland-Hospital-to-Keep-Jahi-McMath-on-Life-Support-236808851.html

She evidently had very severe obstructive sleep apnea which was confirmed by a sleep study performed prior to the surgery. She didn’t just have a little trouble sleeping and snored a bit too loudly but would stop breathing all together several times during the night and that cause her not only her to feel lethargic, but also according to what I’ve read caused her to have other problems like not being able to concentrate at school, mood swings and even wetting herself- urinary incontinence is not uncommon in people with severe sleep apnea. And while people who are overweight are more prone to sleep apnea, untreated sleep apnea increases the risk obesity and makes it harder to lose weight gained and also increases the risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, diabetes and makes heart arrhythmias more likely. Acid reflux is also often a result of sleep apnea. Sleep apnea can be for some people a very serious condition that left untreated, can lead to serious and potentially fatal complications even without surgery. And who knows what conditions this poor girl had other than sleep apnea.

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/sleepapnea/

http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/sleep-apnea/sleep-apnea

This was not at all a routine or minor surgery. Then again, no surgery is simple or routine and without risks.

So I have to wonder why the family says that Jahi was sitting up and laughing and talking to them and asking her mother for popsicles only an hour so after this very major surgery. I also have to wonder about this statement:

“Sometime after the seemingly uneventful Dec. 9 surgery, Jahi was taken to the ICU and Winkfield said she was told the staff had to fix her ICU. About 45 minutes later, Jahi was brought back to her room and was sitting in bed, bleeding from her mouth.”

“"It was normal," Winkfield said the nursing staff told her.”

“Winkfield then said she asked for a doctor. Instead, she said she was given a bigger container for Jahi to bleed into, and later, a suction device to suction out the "increasing volume of blood," the court request states.”

I have to wonder if 1) the family wasn’t following post op instructions to keep Jahi quite and calm, try to keep her from talking, live alone from laughing and not to feed her anything so soon and 2) if someone, either the mother or grandmother who is said to be a nurse although it is not clear whether she is an RN, LPN or a nurses’ aid, got a bit carried away with the suctioning and exasperated the bleeding or caused a hemorrhage to occur. Then again why would the hospital give a suctioning device to the family to use, unless the grandmother, saying she was a nurse and knew how to use it properly convinced them that she could administer care herself????

I’m not saying that this is what happened but it is possible. Of course it is also possible that the bleeding for whatever reason was way beyond normal and that the staff at the hospital didn’t respond quickly enough or ignored her worsening condition. If that is the case then the hospital would be liable for her death. But that’s not to say that the surgeon was at fault either. That’s not also to say that being obese and perhaps with other underlying conditions, that Jahi didn’t suffer a heart attack coincidental but unrelated to the bleeding.

But we won’t know for now or for a while because all we have is the family’s side of the story because they won’t give permission to the hospital to speak to any of the details of what happened and even obtained a restraining order to keep the hospital from doing so. I’m guessing there will be a malpractice and eventual “wrongful death” suit and that all manner of information will come forward.

FWIW, I had a tonsillectomy when I was 18 years old because of severe tonsillitis, an infection so severe and so chronic, too long gone untreated, that the ENT doctor who finally saw me put me in the hospital the very next day for surgery, saying that the infection was so severe, that he was amazed that I hadn’t succumbed to species – I was just that sick.

But after my surgery which was only a tonsillectomy and removal of my adenoids, my parents and I were given instructions that I should not even attempt to talk or attempt eat or drink anything other than ice chips for the next 24-hours and even after that, for the next day or two, that I should only have fruit juice popsicles and Jello in moderation and try to refrain from talking and stay in bed in a semi-reclined position for the next few days.

But I do very vividly recall that shortly after I came out of recovery and was brought to my room for my overnight stay; that I started shivering severely and shaking uncontrollably, like I was freezing to death, except I was not and did not feel cold. A very quick thinking nurse, an RN realized that I was either going into shock (evidently as this- bleeding is not so unusual for a tonsillectomy, and I had from what I was told, bled a lot) or I was having a bad reaction to the anesthesia, she ran out of my room and very quickly came back with a syringe. She rolled me over and plunged the syringe into my butt and within minutes I stopped shaking and felt fine.

I also remember coughing and spitting up blood, a good bit of it and some bleeding from my nose and feeling blood go down the back of my throat in huge clots for several days after the surgery – it was to say the least, quite uncomfortable. But this is rather normal for this type of surgery although quite disturbing. And I can imagine after seeing a friend go through surgery for and recovery from a deviated septum which also results in a good bit of post-op bleeding, that the combination of these surgeries that Jahi had would result in a good deal of post op bleeding.

And if I understand correctly, throat and nasal surgery often has a potential for bleeding even life threatening bleeding because the surgeon can’t simply suture and put a dressing on it and wait for a external scab to develop; the soft mucus membranes in the throat and nasal cavities can be cauterized but they can’t be sutured and bandaged in the same way that is done in other types of surgeries.

It is very sad and tragic, what happened, but then again, no surgery is without risk. And sadly she’s been confirmed to be brain dead, not by just one neurologist but several including the one appointed by the court and by various means of determining brain death. And there isn’t any chance of waking up from true and properly diagnosed brain death.

One of my great nieces, 5 years old, recently had surgery to put in ear tubes and have her adenoids removed because of chronic ear infections. The ENT also recommended removing her tonsils even though they were not enlarged nor infected. Her mom read up on the risks, especially the potentially fatal bleeding risks associated with tonsillectomies and had a conversation with the ENT several days before the surgery and asked him to explain why he was recommending a tonsillectomy and his best answer was “I might as well since I’m in there - they might have to come out eventually”. My niece countered with “that’s not a good enough reason to remove a healthy organ and increase the risks of complications”, to which the ENT said, “Yes, you’re right, it’s not”.

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