A trach is easier and faster than a root canal. It can be done in a minute or two. Not extraordinary. Less time and cost than ambu a child for miles of a ride home. Mama can hold the baby with a trach, no one can hold a person being kept breathing with an ambubag. A ventilator is extra ordinary, a trach is not. I have suctions many patients via a trach that are in coma. No ventilator. No reasonable reason not to do it except for the power of the state to say no. It is a medical necessary to move the child comfortably.
They need to do a tracheostomy, said Dr. Paul Byrne, an Ohio neonatologist with nearly five decades of experience and a former president of the Catholic Medical Association. If the baby is stable otherwise, and has a tracheostomy, then the baby can be taken care of at home.
...But Dr. Byrne told LifeSiteNews that theres no case when a child is on a ventilator where the tracheostomy wouldnt be indicated.
...Dr. Byrne called the attempt to have the state remove Josephs ventilator terrible, absolutely terrible, and insisted that in his fifty years in neonatology hes never removed a childs ventilator. Ive never seen a time to turn off a ventilator, he said. If a baby has a disease process thats so bad that theyre going to die, then they die on the ventilator anyway. So you dont have to stop the ventilator.
He also criticized the common phrase life support, saying, Life is either there or its not there. You dont have to hold up the life. What we do in medicine are actions ... that support the vital activity of respiration.
Assuming doctors can do something to support the vital activities, we ought to do them, he explained. And a tracheostomy ought to be done, and the baby ought to continue on the ventilator.
Though doctors have said Joseph is in a vegetative state, Dr. Byrne called it a made-up term similar to the notion of brain death, which he said was invented simply to get beating hearts for transplantation.
Even Josephs doctor in London has admitted that the tracheostomy could prolong his life. A tracheotomy would likely provide for a longer period of life, however, in our view would not result in improvement of well-being and could reduce quality of life, Dr. Douglas Fraser told the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board in January.
I’m still interested in the basis of categorizing something as “ordinary” or “extraordinary.” Do you have citations?