Schools ponder role as child nears death

As the school bus rolled to a stop outside her Lake County home, Beth Jones adjusted the bright yellow document protruding from the pouch of her daughter's wheelchair, making sure it was clearly visible.

The DNR order goes everywhere with Katie, including her 2nd-grade classroom at Laremont School in Gages Lake. The school is part of the Special Education District of Lake County, where an emotional two-year discussion ended this summer when officials agreed to honor such directives.

Now, district officials find themselves in the unusual position of having planned the steps its staff will, or won't, take to permit a child to die on school grounds. Although DNR orders are common in hospitals and nursing homes, such life-and-death drama rarely plays out in schools, where officials realize how sensitive and traumatic the situation could be for nurses, teachers and students.

Katie's brain was deprived of oxygen before birth. She can't walk, talk or do anything for herself. She is fed through a tube in her stomach and has an increased susceptibility to infection. Violent choking and coughing spasms have signaled a turn for the worse in her condition.

A Do Not Resuscitate order is a doctor's directive, issued with the consent of the family, that cardiopulmonary resuscitation will not be used if the patient suffers from heart or breathing problems. It can also prohibit using such devices as a defibrillator or an intubation tube.

The new DNR policy puts Katie's school district at the forefront of a growing national debate about severely disabled and chronically ill children whose lives have been extended by medical advances -- and whose parents must face heart-wrenching decisions about the future.

You’re arguing apples and broccoli....
Intentionally being obtuse—

Or maybe not ;)

Again, cardiac bypass can keep you from reaching the point of needing 24/7 life support.

OK, here’s mine,
total PVD with vascular shutdown and encroaching gangrene at the outer extremities with repeated amputation/debridement of dead tissue up the limbs.....cardiac bypass then? I think not....the blood wouldn’t have gone anywhere anyhow. (I’ve seen this, it was a horrible way to die).

Or TPN given to someone with multiple metastatic sites including the GI tract, pancreas and liver-—tube feeding wouldn’t be absorbed via the gut lumen at this point and TPN wouldn’t have been able to get past the liver.
(That was Dad-— he just wanted to go home to die and no more needles)

OR tube feeding, chemo and a vent on someone with end stage myleofibrosis, leukemia and meningitis. (That was Hubby, and he had ALL his wishes written out in detail...again, no interventions).

Or a 3000 kcal tube feeding on an endstage Alzheimer's patient who was continually losing weight......while being totally bed bound and comatose. No matter how much we increased, changed or modified the feeding....he lost weight. He was dying. He had been for months, but she really thought that she was saving him (and it wasn't out of love, let me tell you) We could not get it through to his wife that he was simply not absorbing anything we put in him..... She kept yelling "I can't let him starve." All I could think was "Lady, he's starving and unless you can crack open every cell that isn't working, nothing you can do will keep him from starving." But for some reason, she couldn't fathom how 'food in' didn't = 'food absorbed'.

Sometimes bodies shut down....organs stop working and even if you force or replicate organ function..... cells actually stop taking in nutrients and oxygen isn’t even take in anymore. It’s called death.

It happens. And I sincerely believe that God doesn’t appreciate use trying to stop it at that point or us getting all pissy because we aren’t doing everything to stop it.

And I sincerely believe that God doesn’t appreciate use trying to stop it at that point or us getting all pissy because we aren’t doing everything to stop it.

Of course it was apples and broccoli. However, your basic claim was that medical intervention stops the will of God. Taken to a logical conclusion, there's not a lot of intervention we should be doing if we're really concerned with the will of the Almighty.

I am not for any nanny stating at all. I'm also for the preservation of life and the allowance for that in cases where it's the family's or the individual's wish. In this case, they have a DNR. One would have to honor that, in some sort of way.

I'm always careful about making rules from exceptions. Clearly, this child is an exceptional child with exceptional needs. And should not be used as any sort of paradigm from which we institute rules for all of society.

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