Baby Joseph returns to Canada

Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Joseph Maraachli, the terminally ill baby at the centre of a legal and ethical battle that led to his care in a U.S. hospital, returned to Canada on Thursday morning.

The 15-month-old, who arrived at the Windsor, Ont., airport around 7:30 a.m. ET, has a degenerative brain disease.

Canadian doctors had refused to perform a tracheotomy to prolong his life. But in March, the group Priests for Life flew him to a hospital in St. Louis, Mo., where he received the procedure.

His parents hoped he could return to his home in Windsor, but his first stop on Thursday was Windsor Regional Hospital.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/04/21/wdr-maraachli-returns-to-windsor.html

---

Well, at least for now it seems like the tracheotomy worked...

What they said was that there was little point in prolonging this child's life by performing the procedure.

I feel sorry for them - but I feel more sorry for the tot.

Though I'm always troubled by the implication that a severely disabled life isn't worth living. *shrug*

This isn't a decision that assumes "a severely disabled life isn't worth living".

This child has degenerative brain disease, and is a now dying a painful death.

The operation just makes the painful process of dying more protracted for the child than it would otherwise be.

for a longer time.

I knew a young woman in her 20s dying of cancer. The mother of the young woman was keeping a bedside vigil. The young woman looked at her mother and said, "I can't die until you let go." The mother went out of the room and paced the hospital floor for an hour. Then she came back and said, "It's OK. You can go." And the daughter died.

Sometimes we have to let go of those we love--if we care about the other person.

read it elsewhere?

If it is painful Iam shocked they'd make the decision

It worries me that people are afraid of confronting the fact that for a small percentage of severely disabled people, life is not worth living. It is only a completely unconscious technicality, or torture they find themselves unable to escape despite their desire to do so.

Joseph is in a permanent vegetative state - he can not have any feeling or thought about whether life is happy, sad, painful, or otherwise. It's scary for many to admit even to themselves, but that is not "living." The kid is already dead, and the only thing that artificially prolonging his physical existence does is to allow the parents more time for drama and self-delusion.

Harsh? Yes. Truth is not always nice. The money and effort spent saving his breathing corpse could have much better gone into treating many people with illnesses and injuries that disable them, but are correctible and would give them relief or even allow them to function fully in society. "Saving" him for a few more months of parental weeping and wailing while his corpse finally degenerates into death is no "miracle." It's a travesty.

was 'alive.' Their leader, Frank Pavone, likes making abortion videos on youtube.....

Here, you have a child now being kept alive by machine. He's never going to walk, talk, breathe on his own, or have independent thought.....

is a problem especially since the child is terminal. However, my daughter cannot walk, talk, feed herself, dress herself and wears diapers. She needs total care. As to having independent thought - well doctors and people who do not know her well think she has none - but those of us who know her on a daily basis know that she understands much more than given credit for.

I am not disputing the treatment of this child - I have a do not resuscitate for my daughter if she is terminal but we need to be VERY careful about the list of items that we think do not make life worth while. My lady is happy and healthier than a lot of people. When she has a physical the vitals come back perfect. Doc says she may well live to be in her 70s. I think he is wrong because the meds she needs to avoid seizures are hurting her liver even if it is not showing up yet but she would only die if we take those seizure med totally away from her. Or the feeding tube in her stomach that allows her to eat. They cost a lot but if taken away she would die a long painful death. The opposite of what is happening to the child in the story.

I thought, "Finally! repigs are worrying about a lifeform other than a fetus! Has hell frozen over?"

But then I read that this poor baby is, essentially, a fetus outside of the womb since he will never be able to feel or think a thing before his inevitable death.

Once again, repigs only care about fetuses - and that's only if they're in a white mother. If the mother is brown, she is JAT (Just Another Target) for our Freedom Bombs™.

Infanticide, euthanasia, a state-run medical board denying treatment that would extend (some form of) life... they're eating this up.

Also similar to Terry Schiavo case. I wonder if Frist made a diagnosis-by-video like he did with Schiavo.

Of course, you never hear about Schiavo any more from the whackjobs, which (of course) just proves for the 1,000th time they're a pack of wild dogs, easily led by any of their idols (GOPig politician/pundit/billionaire)

anything, to feel like they have tried their best, he is free to let go when he is ready. Even on a ventilator, every kind of tube their is working his body systems, he can still let go.

He is a vegetable; he's already dead. The family is a weird one that wants to preserve a vegetable.

I recently read "Using Terri" about the fight to maintain the body of Terri Schiavo. Although I knew most of the basic facts of the story before reading the book, the information about the ordeal of actually starving to death was enlightening. Even for those who are conscious enough to understand what is happening to them, the actual process is not as "painful" as it is commonly presented. And for those who, like Terri, no longer have the brain apparatus for consciousness, there can be no suffering at all.

In August 2004, my husband and I had to make the painful decision to put down our beloved dog. His cancer was advanced and he was beginning to suffer. Although we knew we would miss him, we chose not to make him suffer for our brief enjoyment of his company. We knew he would be gone eventually regardless, and we had many wonderful memories of him. Less than a year later, my husband was diagnosed with similar cancer, and he experienced a great deal of suffering. At one point, he said to me, "We don't let dogs suffer like this," and I knew the reference was to the one we had put down. Six weeks later, I watched my husband die, not of cancer directly but of drowning by pneumonia because he could no longer clear his lungs of fluid.