Rachel Nyirahabiyambere with two of her grandchildren in 2008.
Posted on 03/10/2011 12:13:39 PM PST by wagglebee
Rachel Nyirahabiyambere with two of her grandchildren in 2008.
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Rwandan immigrant who survived the genocide of 1994 has now had her life cut off by starvation and dehydration, reportedly because a U.S. hospital affiliated with Georgetown University decided that caring for the woman who lost her health insurance was too expensive.
The New York Times reports that Rachel Nyirahabiyambere, a 58-year-old grandmother and refugee from war-torn Rwanda, has been denied food and water since Feb. 19 after her feeding tube was removed.
“It’s all about money,” son Jerome Ndayishimiye, 33, told the Times.
“Now we are powerless spectators, just watching our mother die,” he said. “In our culture, we would never sentence a person to die from hunger.”
Unlike the Terri Schiavo case, every one of Nyirahabiyambere’s family members has been pleading for her right to live. Since last April, Nyirahabiyambere had been severely disabled after suffering a stroke. For eight months, she had been under the care of Georgetown University Hospital, a non-profit entity run by the MedStar Health Corporation and affiliated with the eponymous Catholic university.
But the Times reports that the hospital, frustrated by the woman’s lack of insurance and inability to pay her medical bills, sought a court in Alexandria, Virginia to appoint a guardian for Nyirahabiyambere who would take the grandmother off their hands, on the basis that the family would not make a decision.
The Times reports that Nyirahabiyambere’s sons – immigrants who fled the violence in Rwanda and earned their way from menial jobs to master’s degrees – lost control of their mother’s situation when Judge Nolan B. Dawkins of Alexandria Circuit Court appointed attorney Andrea Sloan as her guardian, despite an apparent conflict of interest: Sloan was the guardian recommended by the attorney for Georgetown University Hospital, even though the family had asked for an independent attorney to represent their mother’s interests.
The Times reports that Sloan then transferred the mother to a nursing home in Millersville, Maryland. The hospital then agreed to pay the costs of nursing home care – but the financial burden assumed by Georgetown University Hospital in that situation was also shortlived. Sloan made arrangements to put Nyirahabiyambere in hospice care and have her feeding tube withdrawn, leaving her to starve to death.
Sloan explained to the Times that the family did not have a right to consume hospital resources that might be allocated to others with better chances of recovery.
“Hospitals cannot afford to allow families the time to work through their grieving process by allowing the relatives to remain hospitalized until the family reaches the acceptance stage, if that ever happens,” Andrea Sloan told the Times in an e-mail. “Generically speaking, what gives any one family or person the right to control so many scarce health care resources in a situation where the prognosis is poor, and to the detriment of others who may actually benefit from them?”
The Times reports that one of Nyirahabiyambere sons protested in a letter to Sloan that “Ending someone’s life by hunger is morally wrong and unrecognized in the culture of the people of Rwanda.”
Sloan, however, responded that she was trying to understand “your culture” and asked flippantly, “Feeding tubes are not part of your culture, are they?”
She said that unless they could prove their mother would like to live “with a feeding tube, in diapers, with no communication with anyone and in a nursing home” that she would not reinstate the feeding tube.
The Times notes that Nyirahabiyambere, the wife of a Baptist minister, came to the United States after surviving the horrors of the Rwandan genocide and violence in refugee camps that divided her family, made her a widow, and forced her to survive in the jungle for a time. Her sons, who became U.S. citizens, brought her to America, where she found work that gave her health care benefits.
Nyirahabiyambere, however, lost her health insurance because she left her job to follow her oldest son to Virginia and help take care of his grandchildren. Generally, U.S. health insurance is employer-based, and not portable for an individual that switches jobs.
Georgetown University Hospital, which says on its website that they provide “physicial and spiritual comfort to patients and families in the Jesuit tradition of cura personalis – care of the person,” declined to tell the Times why they had washed their hands of Nyirahabiyambere’s case and omitted to intervene in Sloan’s course of action.
LifeSiteNews.com contacted the Maryland nursing home Wednesday where Nyirahabiyambere resided, but a spokeswoman said no one would be able to talk about her case, or even confirm if she were alive or dead.
Bobby Schinder of the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network told LSN that he was trying to establish contact with the family, but admitted that at this late stage there might be little that could be done.
From what I read, her sons were citizens, not her. As an illegal, I’m wondering how she was able to get a job that gave her health benefits in the first place. Having said that, it’s very sad and unfortunate, but once she got that job, she should have kept it, if only to keep the health insurance. If her own kids won’t foot the bill to keep her alive, why should the taxpayers?
Isn't it always, these days?
Well said, Mrs. Don-o.
Where did it say in the article that she is illegal? Do you have a quote?
By that I mean you support the idea that a hospital can just decide to starve and dehydrate someone to death?
The hospital has the right to decide where they want to allocate their resources. It is time for the family to assume care for her. If they don't want to why is that the hospital's problem? The real reason she is going to die is that her family is going to let her, not the hospital.
If her sons have masters degrees they should be able to bring her home and do feedings there. It is not a complicated thing to do.. hire home health care or have family members do it.. . I guess I do not understand this..If it were my mother I would do that
Why did she need a hospital, why not a nursing home that could continue to feed and hydrate her? It’s happening all over the country right now. Makes no sense to me.
It is the hospital room and nursing care that is in question
Me either ... My mother in law had a stoke that left her incapacitated ..her daughters took care of her at home ... This lady needs to have the tube replaced and a script for the food given to her family so they can do the feedings ..If she needs IV hydration they can hire a nurse to come in once a day and change the IV.. actually they could learn to do it themselves..
Sometimes Death is a mercy. Unlike many Freepers here,I’ve been in a nursing home for a short time. Believe me, what goes on at night when visitors atre not there will scare the Sh#t of of you....It opened my eyes...
Never again. Not for me and not for any of my loved ones....
Very good points.
I have to wonder if the hospital broached the topic of hospice for her, or if she even qualifies. If so, the government pays, but they don’t shut off food and water. I understand it’s a difficult mine field to manage when you parent reaches the last stages of their lives, but most of us manage. This woman seems to be falling through the cracks.....OR....those Obamacaredeathpanels are already in place. Scary times.
My mother was “sundowning” in the hospital.....she would have gone mad completely in a nursing home. I brought her home and cared for her for over 2 years...she NEVER did that scary sundowning stuff with her family there. She never went back in a hospital at all. She died here in my home, with me at her side. She improved and went out of Hospice for a few years. It was several years later before she succumbed...and it was pretty fast when it happened. Hospice came back and got us through the ordeal. She was incontinent for the last year. I worked my butt off caring for her the way I believed she deserved. She took care of my dad for years and never complained. She deserved the same love and care and I did it myself.
If this family abandoned her, they better get with the game plan pretty quick. If not, the system is overstepping their boundaries. I don’t want death panels. I am not opposed to Hospice, but cutting off food and water is not acceptable. Not at all.
Sorry, this mini rant isn’t all that coherent, but it’s more revisiting a bad time than I can handle. I don’t wish to rewrite and clarify. My apologies.
OK, people: Two sons with advanced degrees cannot afford basic nursing home care for their mother? I smell a rat.
We’re talking approximately $40K a year. That’s $20K apiece, or less than $1,700 a month. There’s more to this story than we’re being told.
Blessings on the sick mother and shame on her sons.
Murdering this poor woman by starving her to death. If the thugs did that to a german shepherd they would be arrested and charged with cruelty.
And this from a Catholic hospital!
Ed
It’s a good thing you weren’t one of the soldiers who liberated the death camps in WWII. You’d have probably remarked that it would take a lot of money to start feeding all those people again and Zyklon B is so much cheaper than C-Rats...
Ed
It always gets down to money, doesn’t it?
While I am for keeping alive people who have a chance to recover and lead a lfe, I am not for feeding tubes, oxygen, ivs for people who cannot ever hope to recover. In my mind that is cruelty. In the case of Terry schiavo, I thought the cruelty lay in not keeping her comfortable. There was no justification in not keeping her mouth and lips moistened and other comforts. Then, too, Terryh's husband was awarded a million or so to spend on her but decided NOT to spend it on her, but himself.
There are a lot of missing facts here-age, condition, mental state, etc.
The truth is that the taxpayers do not need to spend millions on people who do not know they are in this world and cannot recover. They should never have feeding tubes in the first place, but family doesn't want to give up. Once in, it takes a tougher decision to remove.The mistake mostly lies with family who want them to lie there in a vegetable condition for months/years. Then you get death panels making the decisions.
vaudine
I have to leave for a short time, but this article offers some more information:
I’ll be back..
What is the point of this article exactly?
The purpose of the article moron, is to demonstrate that Georgetown is all about $$ and not about its Christian foundation.
And though it is hard for a pro-choice troll like you to understand, this family was a victim of those with machetes.
Go back to Huffy Post....
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