I don't even want to know what it looks like now.

for everyone involved.

A brain dead person can ethically be treated as a corpse.

It is pretty simple when one follows the best and most current science-based medicine.

There is no more girl there. All her family is doing is postponing their grief. At what emotional and financial expense?

That is what is sad. Not poor girl, who has been dead for some time now. All they are doing now is keeping some organs going.

Again, brain dead == dead.

Poor girl then while she still was alive. What do you think the state of the corpse looks like now?

But her brain is undoubtedly toast. That's what brain dead means, and that does not take long to happen.

What the parents are doing is pointless unless they are keeping her for organ donations. (I know. That's crude. But the parents need to get a clue.)

that they are waiting for a "miracle."

So they wouldn't be suitable for transplant anymore.

brain has completely rotted away.

Last edited Fri Jul 31, 2015, 12:13 AM - Edit history (1)

at some of the grotesque comments on this thread. Some DU'ers above refer to this girl as an "it"? Call her a corpse?? Speculate pruriently on "what 'it' looks like now"?!

To answer your so-empathetic question: she looks like their beloved daughter. Except her muscles are atrophied from disuse and her face may look a bit young. She probably has a plastic tube entering the front of her neck (trach for breathing) and a little rubbery tube entering her abdomen (PEG for nutrition). She may open her eyes at times or make sounds or move her limbs.

Are you folks really so incapable of empathy that you can't understand why a family might hang on? All right: I'll explain it then, in the interest of education and maybe opening some eyes to what grief feels like. See, people are human. They have feelings. And it's the family - not us fingerpointers who know squat but sit in judgment - who have to live with the decision to pull the plug. They think about letting her go - but then they think about spending the rest of their lives eaten up by the worry. The worry that if they had only been more patient and more strong and more loving, if they had just hung on, maybe the miracle would have come through for their little girl.

Or maybe they think about all the friends and pastors who from the very first said "Don't give up hope!". Or they think about medical errors in the news - people declared dead who wake up! Cancer diagnoses that turn out to be something else! Can they live knowing they might have killed a beloved child who still had a chance?

Or they think about their church and their faith, and how they've always been taught that God is good and can do anything...and if they pull the plug, aren't they admitting they don't trust God?

And maybe they think, in secret, that they want to be set free. Wouldn't it be better to pull the plug and get back to a "normal" life? And then they are horrified with themselves, and berate themselves for selfishness, for being monsters. So they hope she gets pneumonia or her heart stops or a lightning bolt ends her life. But they castigate themselves for thinking it. And so they keep telling the doctors, "Of course we want her alive, forever, forever! And of course we will spend every moment by her bedside, of course we will go bankrupt and sacrifice our own lives and hopes and futures because that's the Right Thing To Do."

The point is: this is THEIR tragedy. Not ours. To some people here, seems like its an opportunity to make sick smarmy comments. ( I'm gonna assume those people are sixteen and trying to sound cutting-edge...but i'm still gonna beg them to delete the ugly posts above.)

Before you all pile on me, I'll tell you who I am. I am a doctor, and I've seen patients like this girl and families sobbing at the bedside, and I've counseled them and I've pushed for them to let go and accept the inevitable - but ya know what? Some people can't. and it's tragic and it's human and it's no one's damn business but theirs. The patient is not suffering. And the expense of keeping her alive, is something we bear because we want a humane society.

And to make sick remarks and sit in judgment and call their child an "it" and a "corpse" when you have never felt an iota of their anguish - that's a lack of empathy that makes me ill.

May you never have a loved one in a vegetative state. And if you do, hope that your friends and comrades don't snidely refer to him/her as an "it" because they disapprove of your way of grieving.

It is enlightening. Sad, but enlightening.

"it" "the corpse" etc.

It must be horrible for the family to deal with this grief.

TYY

not being silly here
dead is pretty much dead