“But on testing the nerves entering and leaving his brain, I confirmed that his reflexes were all completely absent. He was also unable to breathe for himself without airway and ventilator support.”
You would allow machines to keep the body alive long past brain death for what possible reason?
Yeah, maybe his magical spinal cord could do the breathing for him. That sounds to me like good solid medical knowledge. /s
It rained today.
Thought it was awesome this morning here in the PNW.
Sleeping on a wet wanted to be aired out twin size mattress.
The dry cough that has plagued my thorasic (sic fer sure) is gone though.
Wet bed no cough.
KV now has the cough.
Medemucil is his freind.
And RPT therapy.
The worst thing is we are living as per family tradition through Lenten season with no tv other than EWTN (that is All Catholic tv).
Opera (I dig jazz/he loves country twang).
Oh we are sufferring. LOL
Yet we have hope.
And he did make it to the Our City Reads which is a book from an Author from your neck of the woods and his childhood story of being raised in your neck of the woods.
OMG this is funny. It just started Hailing.
Peace be with you.
Did I just Hijack a thread?
the child wasn’t brain dead...he might have been given medicine for seizures etc that would depress these reflexes.
as a doc, I sympathize with both sides.
a child’s brain is “plastic” and can recover (regenerate) after a brain injury. So that is an argument to continue treatment.
but Catholics say that extraordinary treatment is optional. So you can stop respirators even if the person is not brain dead.
traditionally catholics said the same for feeding tubes, until the pro death people started taking them out with the object to kill people...often from folks whose feeding tubes were placed for staff convenience in the first place, and who could swallow.
that’s why the bishop backed Michael Schiavo, and other cases, but John Paul II, seeing how the pro death people were manipulating these cases, put his foot down on removal of feeding tubes.
In the most severe cases, (e.g. terminal alzheimer’s or Parkinsons disease) the feeding tubes don’t prolong life, they only make it more comfortable...ironically, one example is JP2 himself, who had a feeding tube for the last few weeks of life but died of infection.