Posted on 12/22/2013 4:26:20 PM PST by nickcarraway
The family fighting to keep a brain-dead 13-year-old girl on medical support through Christmas blasted administrators at Children's Hospital Oakland on Thursday evening, saying that hospital officials told them in a private meeting that the girl had to be taken off her ventilator "quickly."
"They said, 'What don't you understand?' She is dead, dead, dead,'" said Omari Sealey, the uncle of Jahi McMath, the Oakland teen who has been kept alive by machines since complications from a tonsil surgery last week in a case that has brought national attention and prayers from social media users around the world. "They just kept referring to her as 'a body.'"
The family's attorney, Christopher Dolan, said he will head to court on Friday morning to seek an injunction to halt any hospital intervention. Hospital officials have not given a timeline to remove the girl from the ventilator, he added
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"They keep saying she is 'dead, dead, dead' and I am hoping the courts will say 'no, no, no,'" Dolan said in a Thursday night news conference. "We just saw her; she is a beautiful young lady. She responds to her mother's touch. She is warm."
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Jahi had tonsil surgery to help her with sleep apnea, weight gain and other health problems and began bleeding from her nose and mouth and experienced cardiac arrest later that night.
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(Excerpt) Read more at contracostatimes.com ...
.if you keep this girl on a vent, you'll have to provide round the clock nursing/resp therapist..
.you'll have to treat many pneumonias...she'll have a catheter so her skin doesn't break down from being incontinent.
..then she'll get urinary tract infections and she'll need more antibiotics...antibiotics which will probably have to be given IV which means she'll probably have to have a permanent PICC line or port.
..think of all the labs that will have to be run..
..think of tube feedings and excoriation around the rectal area from that...
think people...
..is this what any of US would want?....I wouldn't wish it on my worse enemy...not even bammey boy...
Reactions to sound and touch are not functions of the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary functions of the body.
Even involuntary reflexes, such as the pupils constricting to light, disprove brain death. A reaction to sound or touch definitely disproves brain death.
It is possible that the family is imagining these responses, but it is also possible that they are occurring and that the girl is not “brain dead.”
There have been at least three cases in the past few years of people having been declared brain dead, and waking up, including one young man who was soon to be prepared for organ donation, when his cousin, a nurse, discovered that he reacted to a touch on his foot. He made a complete recovery. A middle-aged woman also made a good recovery. These instances are a tiny fraction of “brain death” cases but they do show that the criteria are not infallible.
ouch. That must have been very scary
It has been known to be without legitimate purpose for half a century […]
That truly is an uninformed opinion and should be ignored completely.
Absolutely. Life is more than a blip on a heart monitor.
No, what they really need is the type of lawyer a friend of mine got. When he went to the law firm and talked to the head sleaze, he suggested the “two hungry b!tches he kept chained out back”. Now that’s the kind of lawyer they need.
So what happened?
My mother was a doctor and fought to get a second opinion. Thank god the hospital didn’t go to the courts because the second opinion saved my life.
The blood loss happened the 2nd day after her operation.
Sorry, I do not understand your post.
Thanks. There are two sides to every story. I am surprised at how many FReepers take the word of the media as complete and true.
In the catholic hospital the discussion is about prayer and compassion. It is not about futile efforts to satisfy the need of a grieving parent.
What people forget is that it’s about the patient, not the parent.
Miraculous recovery stories have so many un-published issues that it is downright cruel to suggest them to parents in this situation.
If there are three opinions (usually that’s the number) who say a child like this is dead, they are dead.
Without knowing the particulars the best that any of us can do is pray for the parents. The child is already with God.
I had my tonsils removed at a VA hospital when I was 22 years old. I came very close to bleeding to death. A nurse in the recovery room had a very panicked look on her face and I could hear her on the intercom practically begging doctors to come work on me. Having tonsils removed is not as simple as people think.
So do you mean pulmonary embolism, rather than myocardial infarction? That's what large, mobilized blood clots can do.
If so, she was at risk for PE: obese, operation underway, and possibly on birth control pills (13 yo, black).
Wow. How long was it before you came off the ventilator?
similar situation happened to my uncle a few years ago; former marathon runner and staunch conservative who went in to have his carotid artery cleaned out...he came through the procedure with minor issues and had mapped out his upcoming schedule after the surgery....
the night nurse never checked his oxygen level and the combination of surgery in the throat, swelling in the area, some minor bleeding and not getting enough oxygen caused him to suffocate....despite the fact he had a DNR the hospital resuscitated him after ten minutes and he was brain dead...
the hospital bent over backward for my aunt’s every wish and eventually (5 days later) he was taken off of life support when my aunt and cousins decided the time was right....
this was around 2006....
Months. 3 or 4. It was over 20 years ago early1980s.
My brother (age 43) passed away from a massive brain aneurysm on August 10th, 2012. Doctors said it was so massive, he was dead before he hit the floor.
However it happened, the paramedics who arrived at his home managed to revive him -- meaning they got his heart beating again and he was breathing.
By the time I got to the hospital approximately 2 hours after his aneurysm, the Chief of Neurology had already examined him, as did the Neurologist on staff and a third person who's title I do not remember.
With my sister, youngest brother and I in the room with him, the three of them described my brother Brent's condition. They explained carefully and clearly what happened to him, the tests they'd be running in the twenty-four hour period to come, and the expected results.
Forty-five minutes after meeting with them, the results of the first test - a CT Scan of the brain came back and confirmed the location of the aneurysm, at the base of his brain stem (the worst possible place) and as blood leaked it would choke off the blood supply to his brain.
My sister, youngest brother and I were then pulled into a room with the same three doctors and advised to have a special type of MRI performed on our own brains as the type of aneurysm my brother Brent had was genetic. If the shock of losing our brother wasn't enough to process, now the three of us faced the possibility that it could happen to us. We were just overwhelmed.
I stayed with my brother that night in the hospital room (the only family member to do so.) I heard the ventilator kick in at 2:42am on Saturday, August 11th. My brother had passed, he was no longer breathing on his own. His brain was keeping his heart beating but his body temperature was dropping. He was surely dying. An attending nurse came in to confirm the ventilator had kicked in. I asked if indeed it was the ventilator that I heard, he replied "yes, your brother is now on full life support."
We flew my mother in from Florida that morning. When she arrived at the hospital that afternoon we were already told that our brother Brent was gone.
She refused to believe it. I wish the things that fell on me as the oldest son to do that day didn't fall on me.
I asked the attending Neurologist if he could brief the family on my brothers condition, the tests they'd run and his state. I'll never forget it. It was 4:10 in the afternoon August 11th, 2012 when the attending Neurologist gave the family with my mother in attendance his report indicating test results and finally pronouncing death by 4:15pm that afternoon.
To your point about sometimes a family holding out for a miracle that isn't going to happen, yes -- sometimes Doctors do need to spell out in very clear and certain terms what the situation is for a family to accept what has happened so they can begin to grieve.
I pray God blesses and keeps these parents near and dear to His heart and comforts them as only He can.
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