Judge denies TRO to terminally ill boy

4/6/2007 11:46 AM
By: News 8 Austin Staff

~snip~ The 16-month-old has been hospitalized since December for a neurological disorder that causes brain tissue to die. Doctors believe Emilio has Leigh’s Disease, a condition treated primarily through vitamin therapy.

But on March 12, an ethics committee at the Children’s Hospital of Austin deemed the child’s life futile and voted to end his treatments.

Under Texas law, a hospital is required to wait 10 days before ending treatment to allow for a transfer to another hospital. The boy's family was actually given until April 10 to find alternative care. ~snip~

http://www.news8austin.com/content/your_news/default.asp?ArID=182025


~snip~ President Bush signed a law, the Texas Advance Directives Act, when he was Governor of Texas. This law, that has been used several times and as recently as a few days ago, liberalized the situations under which a person in Texas can avoid artificial life support. Under it, life support can be withheld or withdrawn if you have an “irreversible condition” from which you are expected to eventually die. Indeed, this law, signed by then Governor Bush allows doctors to remove patients from life support if the hospital’s ethics committee agrees; only allowing the family 10 days finding another facility that might accept the patient, barring any state judicial intervention. ~snip~

http://www.house.gov/list/press/fl20_schultz/pr_20050321.html

:shrug: All those "right to life" fundies? Hello? Busy this weekend?

Hypocrites. :mad:

And hence has no right to life under the Republican Fascist Underclass Enabling Acts.

Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that Bush signed the ordinance.

Interesting how the Schiavo-ites refuse to protest something that is actually wrong. They are the Anti-Christ.

I was wondering that too, where is the "Teri was murdered" crowd?

They're on it. No one is more upset about this law and how it's being used than they are. Just because we're not seeing a media circus doesn't mean they're not on it.

Seems they're not worth the trouble.

Uh, that would be called "being alive", right? I mean, is there anyone who ISN'T expected to eventually die?

care, in which the only thing medical care can do is keep the body alive. Usually the mind's shot by the time the docs invoke this law.

I've seen the news for 2-3 of these cases. In all cases the person's mind is gone or nearly so, and regardless of what the hospitals do the person's just going to get worse.

The law disproportionately hits poor families. If the family (or its insurance) can pay, they can usually find someplace to transfer the patient to some place that'll take money for keeping the person's lungs filled with air and the person's heart beating. A lot of families make the decision before the doctors do, if they have to pay.

Her mind wasn't gone, she wasn't dead yet, and if she'd gotten better care from the beginning, she'd have had a better chance. In her case, too, insurance wasn't an issue--she had plenty.

what happened. Do you have some of the DU links or can you remember the name?

It took an interesting coalition of Right-to-Life and Michael Moore and DU to fight that one. I still wonder how that didn't make national news.

I can't find it in a search, but I know people around here were involved and remember it. I called a lot of people to find care for her, and I got a RTL friend involved who really got things moving, and I even tried to get her sister moved up here to get care and then fought with the hospital for it. It all was crazy.

phenomenal story and it's wonderful that you participated. I didn't know that MM was involved. It would make a good book or movie, IMO. At least the Right to Lifers weren't hypocritical on this one, as was the very definition of the word, GWB.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=3140443

This has a decent recap of the story. Th1onein posted many threads about her sister and trying to save her from the hospital removing all care and killing her early. Andrea did die, but it was on her own time and surrounded by family. You can PM her if you want to know more about who-all was involved.

First, they tried to talk our family into agreeing to pull her plug.

When that failed they threatened us with an Ethics Committee Meeting so that they could pull her plug without our, or her, consent.

We threatened to picket their hospital. (And we ended up doing just that.)

Then they had a meeting and decided to increase her pain medication to a degree that would completely anesthetize her and make her seem brain dead. They also very rudely tried to keep us from seeing her when she the pain medication was wearing off. They don't like to pull the plug on patients who are aware and fighting to live. They had tried this shit once before, before they had put her on pain medication and she wrote a note that said, "I don't want to die. I want to live." I guess they couldn't get around that blatant a request to live. (Increasing the pain medication to the point of oblivion for these patients is par for the course, when the intention is to end their lives without against their wishes.)

Then they had an Ethics Committee Meeting, giving us almost no notice, and decided our sister's life wasn't worth living, no matter how she felt about it, or how we, her family, felt about it.

What most people don't know and what is really a death warrant for these patients is that Houston hospitals, together, have a policy to take no patient that has "futile" written on their charts. Once that Ethics Committee waves their magic futile wand, you will not get your loved one transferred to any hospital in the area. And if you try to transfer them to an out of state hospital, you are endangering their very fragile status, clinically. And, even if you could get an out of state hospital to take them, you would have to do it within a ten day limit.

And, the procedures that you have to follow, to get the patient transferred, require the cooperation of the very people who deemed that patient futile. It simply doesn't happen, and it sure doesn't happen in ten days.

The insurance companies, and money, of course, are at the bottom of this. They negotiate a certain amount of money that they will pay the hospitals, for patients in ICU. But there is an unspoken agreement that the hospital will not "stick it to" the insurance companies by having a patient in ICU for too many days. When those days pass, the insurance company begins to raise hell with the hospital and the hospital begins ethics committee hearings on the patient.

Having insurance does not protect you in the State of Texas. Having an advanced directive does not protect you in the State of Texas. No matter how you, personally, feel about the right to die, and what you want to happen to you, should a doctor decide that treating you for an ailment is "futile," the State of Texas only protects your right to die, not your right to live.

They stopped his vitamins BEFORE the ten days was even up. That might sound trivial to most people, but this disease is usually treated with thiamine!

These people are some sneaky fucks! And they ARE playing God!

ignorance, but I really don't know. Terminal Resuscitative Options?

'ethics committee'; typical orwellian name for something that has little to do with ethics but a LOT to do with the balance books.