Posted on 12/17/2013 3:41:47 AM PST by Wanderer99
Edited on 12/17/2013 8:58:28 AM PST by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
A 13-year-old Northern California girl will be taken off life support Tuesday after she was declared brain dead following complications from surgery to remove her tonsils.
KTVU-TV reported Monday that the head of the pediatrics department at Children's Hospital Oakland had told the family of Jahi McMath that the girl would be pulled from life support because she had been declared dead under California law.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Are you suggesting this would not have happened a few years ago? Where were you during the Schiavo case?
I can’t imagine the heartbreak of losing a child and pray that I never experience it.
I don’t think people fully appreciate the risks associated with anesthesia and surgery in general. Sometimes bad things happen.
Also, the little girl looks to be fairly overweight which can contribute to apnea. Surely her parents were made aware of that. I wonder if they eschewed the advice of weight loss for their daughter and insisted on surgery. Or maybe she’d already lost substantial weight....
Regardless, I’m sorry for their loss.
Very interesting. I had my tonsils removed when I was 30 because of repeated infections. It was done in a doctor's office and I was awake during the entire procedure; the doctor gave me a drug that was unlike anything I had had before or ever since. It made me fearless. Even the scapel going into my mouth (which was locked open by some device) elicited no concern.
Based on what you write, I was in more danger than I thought at the time.
“Sealey told KTVU that Jahi McMath did not want to undergo the tonsillectomy procedure, and even told her mother before she went under that “something bad is going to happen to me.”
Wife has been a nurse for some time and once told me a few surgeons she worked with will postpone an operation if the patient comes out with something to this extent...almost as if they know..
Sat through a briefing by a noted Doctor from the windy city
speaking on the direction the medical community is going to HAVE to go if they wish to survive under the new economy where insurance is NOT going to pay as they have in the past.
What really impressed me was the quote that hospitals kill two hundred and fifty thousand a year.
Most T/A’s in adults are done in hospitals because of those risks....even with laser instruments the risks for complications are higher in adults then kids under 6.
My heart breaks for the family of this girl.
Without getting into detail, I learned long ago that even “minor” surgery can have devastating impacts. You should also think at least 5X about letting someone open you up or lase you. And, despite their degrees, assurances and confident demeanor, not all doctors know what they’re doing. Research their track records!
In the Terri Schiavo case, the next of kin (husband) made the decision to terminate her life support, but in this case some entity other than the family made the decision, so I don’t see how you can compare the two.
Anytime you go in for surgery you sign a large number of disclaimers stating the possible risks.
The general assumption on this thread is that the surgeon MUST have screwed up or the child would not have died. That’s not the way risk works.
If you perform a large number of any surgery, some small percentage of those will result in severe complications or even death.
Them’s the facts. To my mind it is liberals who refuse to accept tradeoffs, that small risks of severe consequences must be faced and balanced against the much more likely good results. Which means of course that some people will lose this bet.
Liberals refuse to accept this fact, and insist that any negative outcome must be the result of human error or malevolence. In fact, I think the refusal to accept this is the defining characteristic of liberalism.
People want their utopia and will behave chaotically to get it!
Or as Christ said...”The Kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the desperate take it by force”!
Actually bleeding is a complication. My secretary’s daughter just went through this, about the same age, and had to go back in to get the bleeding stopped. She came through eventually okay. Part of it was forcing fluids on someone who didn’t want anything to go down her throat. Rough week.
I had my tonsils removed as a 15 year old and had the same bleeding thing, of course it was remedied but not before it scared everybody.
I think there must be a special risk for a teenage.
My child hemorrhaged after a tonsil/adenectomy, and it was the devil to try and control. It was a sudden and massive loss of blood.
We spent three very scary days.
I had my tonsils removed about 2 months ago,, the worse thing I ever went through, my face hurt for two weeks.
But I lived, and Im thankful..
The Government deciding who will get care and live and who will be denied care and will die will not end well here in the USA.
How is it 13 year old girls can sign that paperwork when they seek an abortion without parental (or even judicial) consent?
Girls and women DO still die from complications of botched LEGAl abortions.
Some procedures are more politicized and "sacred" than others, apparently.
In this case, it is likely a genuine “act of God” rather than any form of malpractice. While the strongly bleeding tonsils get the attention, it was likely an unpredictable reaction to the anesthesia that killed her.
To start with, *any* time general anesthesia is administered there is a chance for brain damage or even death.
“Perioperative mortality is mortality in relation to surgery, often defined as death within two weeks of a surgical procedure.”
“A 1997 Canadian retrospective review of 2,830,000 oral surgical procedures in Ontario between 1973–1995 reported only four deaths in cases in which either an oral and maxillofacial surgeon or a dentist with specialized training in anaesthesia administered the general anaesthetic or deep sedation. The authors calculated an overall mortality rate of 1.4 per 1,000,000.”
This is a lot more than it seems, if you consider the enormous number of oral surgeries performed in the US these days.
Next up, though this *didn’t* happen to her, is radically increasing the mortality rate in post surgery patients, are “nosocomial” (acquired in a hospital), antibiotic-resistant infections. Already some 30,000 Americans are dying of these a year, and the number keeps increasing.
They can be very fast. Some MRSA (resistant staph) infections are now killing seemingly healthy people in hours. Post surgical patients, with inhibited immune systems, are like shooting fish in a barrel for this and the dozen other major drug resistant bacterial infections.
You said ... “I must not forget to mention the illegals who get free care.”
BUT they get the same kind of ‘worthless care’ ... :-) ...
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