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Alive or Dead? What Would You Do?


Estimated Prophet

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Alive or dead?

What would you do?

An Oakland family whose 13-year-old daughter has been declared brain dead is hoping to celebrate Christmas in the hospital with her after a judge ordered hospital officials to keep her connected to a breathing machine.

Jahi McMath was declared brain dead after experiencing complications following a tonsillectomy at Children's Hospital in Oakland.

As her family sat stone-faced in the front row of the courtroom, an Alameda County judge on Monday called for Jahi to be independently examined by Paul Graham Fisher, the chief of child neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine. The judge also ordered the hospital to keep Jahi on a ventilator until Dec. 30, or until further order from the court.

Read the rest of the article here - http://www.nbcnews.c...99#.UrmW8S1OnFR

Edited by Still Waters
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This is a "no win" tragedy no matter how it pans out... I have no idea how I would decide, if it were my child... But unfortunately at some point the sheer emotional and financial cost would be

too great... eventually this child will have to be taken off of life support.. The gut wrenching question is - when?...

Edited by Taun
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:cry: I want to understand how with all the advances in medical procedures today, this girl was subject to a situation where she bled so profusely. I mean whole hearts are transplanted without this result and this was about the tonsils? I just don't get it.
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I would pray for a miracle. Other than that I feel it's one of those situations where you can't really say what you'd do unless it's happening to you. Terribly sad article.

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:cry: I want to understand how with all the advances in medical procedures today, this girl was subject to a situation where she bled so profusely. I mean whole hearts are transplanted without this result and this was about the tonsils? I just don't get it.

Sometimes things just go wrong. Sometimes doctors make mistakes despite every precaution and other times docs can be negligent. Thankfully these kinds of tragedies are relatively rare but with our system being roiled by changes these days they will sadly become more common I'm afraid. Such a horrible situation for her family. Keeping her body alive in a CCU of a major hospital will cost someone (probably the hospital) thousands of dollars per day. Once rationing begins, these decisions are going to really cause strife and screams of bias and unfairness.
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Horrible decision to have to make, and a shame the courts are making it instead of the family.

If multiple doctors said my child was brain dead and the chance of him ever coming back where basically nil, or even extremely small, I would let him go. This may have something to do with my beliefs, but I would think they had something else to go do and their time with me was over. I'm not sure I would survive it either though.

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it is very hard to put down old sick dog than is part of the family. i can't imagine what it'd take to pull a plug on your own child.

Edited by aztek
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Having been through my own NDE almost 7 years ago, I would let the child go. If it were my own child and the situation developed as this one has, I would let the child go.

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If the parents know 100 percent that there child can't come out of it and recover fully then they should let the child go in peace.

They are giving them selfs false hope, in the real world only like 1 percent of people come out of and if its as bad as the doc say then do what's best or the kid

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:cry: I want to understand how with all the advances in medical procedures today, this girl was subject to a situation where she bled so profusely. I mean whole hearts are transplanted without this result and this was about the tonsils? I just don't get it.

You can say that about a lot of things. They shouldn't happen, but they do - even under the best of circumstances.

Nothing is 100% fully safe.

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maybe the judge was just trying to give the family time to come to terms with the reality of it?

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Update -

The family of a US teenager declared brain dead after a routine operation went wrong has won an extension to the court order keeping her alive.

On Monday, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evelio Grillo ordered the hospital to maintain Jahi on a ventilator until 7 January.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...canada-25552818

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http://abclocal.go.c...tate&id=9376174

By now most who stay tuned to the news have heard of the tragedy of this 13 year old child who died during a routine surgery. By current standards she bled out and became brain dead due to loss of blood. She was resuscitated and put on a vent but shows no brain activity at all. Essentially she is being kept alive by her brain stem and a machine. At her age and in apparently good health prior to this tragedy, her body could continue breathing for years. At current rates her care could run into the millions of dollars. NO insurance at any level could cover this expense so of course the taxpayer is on the hook. So my question is this - who gets to make this decision? The mother wants the machine to be forever or until her daughter "wakes up". This is understandable and it's a horrible tragedy to lose a child but the reality is that barring a miracle the child will never recover and the millions in care she will need could actually make a difference in the lives of many who CAN be helped. So in steps the ipab at some point and says no, it's too little chance of benefit for too great an outlay. It sounds imminently reasonable until the person who is dying is a loved one...

Edit - sorry, mods... I didn't see that the topic already had a thread. My approach is more about the connection of the IPAB so can you please combine it with the other thread?

Edited by and then
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http://abclocal.go.c...tate&id=9376174

By now most who stay tuned to the news have heard of the tragedy of this 13 year old child who died during a routine surgery. By current standards she bled out and became brain dead due to loss of blood. She was resuscitated and put on a vent but shows no brain activity at all. Essentially she is being kept alive by her brain stem and a machine. At her age and in apparently good health prior to this tragedy, her body could continue breathing for years. At current rates her care could run into the millions of dollars. NO insurance at any level could cover this expense so of course the taxpayer is on the hook. So my question is this - who gets to make this decision? The mother wants the machine to be forever or until her daughter "wakes up". This is understandable and it's a horrible tragedy to lose a child but the reality is that barring a miracle the child will never recover and the millions in care she will need could actually make a difference in the lives of many who CAN be helped. So in steps the ipab at some point and says no, it's too little chance of benefit for too great an outlay. It sounds imminently reasonable until the person who is dying is a loved one...

Edit - sorry, mods... I didn't see that the topic already had a thread. My approach is more about the connection of the IPAB so can you please combine it with the other thread?

How exactly does this have anything to do with IPAB? It is not an insurance issue. The girl is dead. She is absolutely dead. There is a 0% chance for her to ever wake up.

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How exactly does this have anything to do with IPAB? It is not an insurance issue. The girl is dead. She is absolutely dead. There is a 0% chance for her to ever wake up.

Yes, I agree that she IS dead. But the point here is that her parents do not think so and are demanding that she receive care that will run into the millions potentially. The connection (and it is valid and NOT about bashing the ACA) is that the IPAB will be responsible for making calls like this and not all will be so clear cut.
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Yes, I agree that she IS dead. But the point here is that her parents do not think so and are demanding that she receive care that will run into the millions potentially. The connection (and it is valid and NOT about bashing the ACA) is that the IPAB will be responsible for making calls like this and not all will be so clear cut.

You cannot "demand" care. It is unethical to perform surgeries on a dead person, and no doctor will do it, nor should an insurance cover it (they never have, and never will). This is not a case of someone in a coma. She is literally legally dead. She has no blood flow to the brain at all. It is possible that there is even a death certificate already issued.

Edit: I don't know what you think the IPAB actually does, but it is not going to ration medical care. You seriously think that FIFTEEN people are going to review the care of 300 million Americans everytime they go to the doctor or hospital?

Edited by Agent0range
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What's a shame is that the family absolutely refuses to accept that she's brain dead.

The testing they do to determine brain death is extremely accurate. If her body lingers on...she will have a urinary catheter, breathing tube, feeding tube. She'll have to be turned every 2 hours to prevent bed sores; someone will have to change her diapers. And her body will eventually succumb to pneumonia (or some other horrible complication), which is very common in someone who's been ventilated and immobile for long periods of time.

I understand that people don't want to let go. It's every parent's worst nightmare. But there's a fine line between hope....and selfishness. The thing I keep coming back to is if they had donated her organs as soon as she was declared, they could of saved several other families from suffering the same loss.

I just hope she doesn't linger too long. She deserves peace.

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I experienced this first hand when my wifes sister was head injured in a car accident. It was the most heart wrenching and confusing time in my life. I don't wish this on anyone. I still dream about it 30 years later. She was 17 when she died.

Hank

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You cannot "demand" care. It is unethical to perform surgeries on a dead person, and no doctor will do it, nor should an insurance cover it (they never have, and never will). This is not a case of someone in a coma. She is literally legally dead. She has no blood flow to the brain at all. It is possible that there is even a death certificate already issued.

Edit: I don't know what you think the IPAB actually does, but it is not going to ration medical care. You seriously think that FIFTEEN people are going to review the care of 300 million Americans everytime they go to the doctor or hospital?

Again, I am not disputing her condition - I am speaking of what her family wants and to a greater extent, what the country will be grappling with when this system becomes more fully entrenched. The ipab is a body that will decide what the government WILL pay in a given year for medicare and medicaid. Obviously it has a lot of complicated issues surrounding how that decision is made but essentially it is about finding a way to do the job within a certain budget. If anything is certain about government it is that it cannot efficiently spend money. So cuts are inevitable every year. Ipab will decide what gets cut. When it is decided that procedure x can be reimbursed for amount y then a hospital will decide whether it is cost effective to continue performing procedure x. Hospitals are business and even non profits cannot consistently operate at a loss. So since no insurance plan could cover such expenses as this family will necessarily be demanding of the government, an ipab decision will have led to (in the eyes of the family) the death of their child. I don't subscribe to the hysteria of calling this situation "death panels" but I understand why the general population will think of them this way. It is the root of the problem with the ACA. Too much is expected to be paid for by too few. Decisions about who can be helped will have to be made. It's a numbers game and it is reality.
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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks AndThen, I didn't know that the government was assembling a panel to decide personal budgets. With the House getting involved in health care I guess it makes sense that they would also decide who gets how much. Interesting. I was hoping there would be more posts here on this story, there are several ranters on MSN comments..

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I don't understand the public outcry or the anger from psuedo celeb doctors like Dr. Drew about this case. I have seen more than a few cases of people kept alive by their families, she is not the first nor will she be the last. In the end it is their decision. I don't get why there isn't more outrage over the malpractice at the hands of the hospital. Hours went by with her bleeding and she bled to "death", for a routine procedure.

Edited by darkmoonlady
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