Posted on 11/10/2009 10:52:34 PM PST by pillut48
In the end the young father could fight no longer.
For more than a year he had made daily visits to the hospital bedside of his chronically-disabled son.
For six emotional days in the High Court he had battled against the hospital - and the baby's mother - who were reluctantly seeking the right to withdraw life support.
Finally, faced with overwhelming evidence, he made the 'agonising' decision to let his beloved son go.
Both parents wept as the court was told he no longer opposed the hospital's application.
They said later they wanted to spend 'what little time remains with their beloved son'.
The father's heart-breaking move came after an independent expert said his son's quality of life was not good enough to justify prolonging it.
The 13-month-old boy, identified only as RB, has an extremely rare disorder that has robbed him of almost all muscle control.
His brain is undamaged, but trapped in an almost immovable body, unable to speak or even smile.
Incapable of breathing, he has been dependent on a ventilator since he was born.
Now it will be turned off within days. Doctors will administer a large dose of sedative to ensure the little boy does not suffer as he dies.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
My dad, born in Detroit, but raised in Canada with his French parents, returned to the USA when he was 17 to enlist in the US Army. He had to learn English.
He was expecting to go to Europe because of his French language, but the war was coming to an end, and he was sent to Japan to serve in the occupation forces.
He was sent to Korea as an infantryman and was in long bloody engagements in the face of Chinese troops pouring in from the North. I have listened to his accounts on may occasions.
His service prompted me to serve 6-1/2 years myself in the Air Force, including the final two years of the Viet Nam era. Ironically, I was never sent to Viet Nam, but to Korea. I was at Kunsan Airbase in 1976 during the infamous “tree-cutting” incident in the DMZ.
My experience in Asia contributed to my call back to Asia as a Christian missionary. I have served in two communist countries and a third with a Marxist element that unfortunately gets coddled by the government (Philippines).
My wife and I have seven children. We have five grandchildren thus far. You have read about the blessings of God in our daughter's life and our granddaughter's life, with regard to difficult health conditions.
I simply cannot abide what is happening. I know from personal close-up observation that when Marxist types get into office they immediately go to work to fix their positions and policies to be irrevocable, and to establish themselves in “eternal” authority by any means, constitutional or un-constitutional, ethical or unethical, moral or immoral. They cheat, they lie, they deceive, they pass the shells of legislation and fill in the details when our backs are turned.
Marxist-socialists will configure their power and policies so that the Constitution of the United States will be meaningless in any attempts to restore the free state—the Republic. They will drive men to desperation . . . deliberately. They will create enemies that nobody can defend against without good and right citizens being viewed as the enemies of the state.
We are at war in our own nation right at this moment, against Marxist-socialism in league with Islam. This needs to be said and I am saying it. It is only a matter of (a short span of) time before the common people of America, those of our original heritage, awake to the call and fight and sacrifice in this war to preserve freedom for their children, or until they are simply caught, trapped, and overwhelmed by the enemy to point where we will have gulags and concentration camps.
Then the only repair will come with square miles after square miles soaked in blood.
It is time to sacrifice our time, energy, and resources now, and not wait.
Amen, brother, amen!
Don’t be silly.
I never cease to be awed by so much medical progress we benefit by today and I believe there will be much more in the future. These procedures are intended to save lives, improve lives.
Reliance on a machine to breathe for someone is an entirely different scenario.
A poster (was it you?) recommended this little 13 month old boy should have an operation and be sent home with his father who would care for him. That is the first I heard any mention of an operation to improve his condition and that, as a result, his father could take him home and care for him. What do you know about this operation?
You didn’t read the whole post. My 9 y/o daughter offered her suggestion—to find a child the same age with no brain or super severe brain damage but a good body, and have a brain transplant operation, so both of them can live.
Who knows? Maybe when she’s an adult that will be possible.
Don’t be insulting. Why do you and the other ‘give him deathers’ get to draw the line where life begins, and ends? Why do you get to choose WHO gets to live, and WHO gets to die?
It’s a VERY serious question, NOT a ‘silly’ one, to me, and apparently many other life-endorsing FReepers here.
You’ve insulted me because obviously you haven’t read all my posts. I’m no “deather”, as you put it!
This baby boy was born in this condition. He has never known any of the wonderful sensory experiences that babies normally encounter (a baby needs such physicality for normal brain developement). He has NEVER been able to breathe on his own. If he can breathe without a ventilator, if those chest muscles can work as they are supposed to, then that means his body possibly can function in other ways too, and hope would exist for his future. But no one will know unless he is taken off the ventilator. Right now he is nothing more than a dead body, a vegetable, with a living brain.
You know he was born this way, don’t you? Doctors are defying GOD, keeping alive a person who at birth would have died. I say, give the kid a chance and take him off the ventilator. Let him make liars of all the doctors by proving he can breathe on his own.
Now, does that make me a “deather”?
When my youngest brother was born in 1970 he was very premature (especially for 1970) and my parents were told that if he did survive he would probably be very sick all of his life and would probably die before the age of ten.
When he graduated high school he was one of the top ten medium distance runners in the country. After college he went into the Army and completed Ranger School (he never got to be a Ranger because a broken shoulder caused too many problems so he eventually left the Army).
The medical “experts” do not understand that God really doesn’t care about their opinions.
What people don't understand is that EVERY medical device and drug was "extraordinary" when it was first introduced.
In 1940 my great-uncle died from an infection due to a ruptured appendix. In 1982 my appendix ruptured and the infection was probably far worse than what killed my great-uncle, but because of modern antibiotics I was fine. To follow the logic of some on this thread I should have been left to die.
The culture of death is generally made up of atheists, but they love to accuse everyone of "playing God" when we try to keep someone alive.
What they do not understand is that if God didn't want us to have pacemakers and ventilators or even aspirin and antibiotics WE WOULD NOT HAVE THEM. It is just that simple.
What would be the end result of such a transplant aside from both potentially living afterward?
YES I DO.
You endorse the death of an innocent child who has a FUNCTIONING BRAIN. THINK ABOUT THAT. He’s not some mindless lump of human flesh just laying in a hospital bed. That means HE RESPONDS TO OUTSIDE STIMULUS—he has responded in some way to people around him, be it just blinking at them or whatever! HE IS AWARE OF HIS SURROUNDINGS. HE IS SENTIENT. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS?!
Lots of people today walking around who need oxygen tanks and ventilators to breathe—needing one justifies putting him to death??
NO. NO. A THOUSAND TIMES—NO. :*(
It’s a 9 y/o’s suggestion—in her innocent eyes, both would carry on with a normal life, similar to the way people who get heart transplants do nowadays.
Yes, you are selfish.
I got that, but I can't figure out why you even posted it You also included your own thought: ...similar to the way people who get heart transplants do nowadays. I doubt your daughter said that and it indicates to me that you agreed with her.
There is no similarity at all. The idea of trading brains is ludicrous, yet I believe you see some promise in doing it.
Why would you even mention a child's solution if you didn't see merit in it, and what ever were you thinking by burdening your very young child with such a serious situation?
I await your response to my previous post.
No. I hear God weeping that one of His precious children can be so callously discarded, just like those who are aborted... can you?
This is NOT the same as abortion. Doctors have been keeping him artificially alive on a ventilator, otherwise he would have been in Heaven quite a while ago.
Terry Schiavo had a real chance at rehabilitation in the care of her parents. She was murdered. But this baby supposedly can’t even breathe on his own. He can’t play out in the sunlight, run about chasing butterflies - he’s attached to machines, motionless. If he isn’t taken off the ventilator he and us will never know whether he will have a chance at growing up.
I’m hoping he’ll prove the doctor’s wrong! It’s happened before and it can happen again.
Oh, please! You've done nothing but that on this thread. What do you want me, and other freepers to believe? That because your child tests at the seventh grade level that she is capable of reasoning as an intelligent adult? Sorry to burst your proud bubble, but she isn't.
I'll say it again. Trading brains is a ludicrous idea yet one I could understand a child proposing...never a sensible adult who would not post such a juvenile opinion.
Apparently you can't think of any reasonable answers to my questions so you resort to saying I want to pick a fight.
I believe someone here described you as silly. As much as I don't want to demean you, saying you value the input of a child (testing on a 7th grade level!), can only be described as silly.
Respond if you care to, but only if you answer my question regarding the result of trading brains.
Hey, dude/dudette/whatever. Leave my daughter out of this, alrighty then. FR is all about OPINIONS and FACTS, or didn’t you get the memo?
I made an aside OPINIONATED comment about something my daughter said, quite common here on FR when FReepers quote people around them during ‘thread drift’. I never based an entire life’s philosophy on the comments of a child. Why are you obsessing on this?? You don’t like children, apparently, and look on them as ‘out of sight, out of mind’. That’s fine. But for me, after teaching young children for many many years, I can tell you some of the most thought-provoking, laser focused, straight to the matter answers to life’s hard questions (”Where do we go when we die?” etc.) come from children—”OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES”...is very true, IME.
Your kind of OTT liberal responses brings out my tin foil hat and the ‘undercover trolls at FR for years’ starts getting more and more evidence...< shrugs >
Have a nice day. There’s some great sci-fi forums around if you’d like to debate on brain transplants in the distant future. Okey? Me, I’m all for staying on topic for the most part, LOL. (Knowing that thread drift will always be a part of many posts, no matter what, LOL.)
Imagined threats? Only in your tunnel vision, pal. I sure in he~~ believe our country needs to be ready at all times to defend itself and go to the aid of the persecuted in other countries when asked for help.
I've yet to hear of any American being denied health care because they are not insured. U.S. taxpayers are charged even with covering some of the costs of illegal aliens who have broken our laws by not waiting in line to be admitted.
Our health care system can and should be improved but a government takeover is a terrible solution.
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