A judge on Tuesday ordered that a 13-year-old Northern California girl declared brain dead after suffering complications following a tonsillectomy be taken off life support.

But Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evelio Grillo gave Jahi McMath's family until 5 p.m. Dec. 30 to file an appeal. She will stay on life support until then.

Grillo issued the order after a Stanford doctor testified that Jahi is brain dead. Dr. Paul Graham Fisher's evaluation was the second to reach that conclusion.

Children's Hospital of Oakland, where Jahi is hospitalized, has asked that the girl be taken off life support after doctors there also concluded she was brain dead.

Her family has said it believes she is still alive and that the hospital should not remove her from the ventilator without its permission.

Hospital lawyers disagree.

"Because Ms. McMath is dead, practically and legally, there is no course of medical treatment to continue or discontinue; there is nothing to which the family's consent is applicable," the hospital said in a court filing on Tuesday.

Fisher first provided his opinion to Grillo behind closed doors Tuesday morning. Fisher briefly provided his conclusions in open court that Jahi has no brain activity. Fisher left court without taking questions.

Dr. Robin Shanahan, a Children's Hospital doctor, was next called to testify in the judge's chambers.

Grillo has previously ordered Jahi to remain on life support until Dec. 30, or until further order from the court.

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

The judge on Monday had called for Jahi to be independently examined by Fisher, the chief of child neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

On Dec. 12, doctors concluded the girl was brain dead and since then have wanted to remove her from life support. Jahi's family wants to keep her hooked up to a respirator and eventually have her moved to another facility.

"They failed her," said Sandra Chatman, Jahi's grandmother and a registered nurse, who sat in Grillo's courtroom for more than three hours Tuesday during the closed door testimony. "Jahi could have been saved."

"Miracles happen," Chatman added.

The family's attorney, Christopher Dolan, said he would file an emergency appeal to keep Jahi on life support if the trial judge orders her removal from the ventilator.

Dolan also wants a third evaluation done by Dr. Paul Byrne, a pediatric professor at the University of Toledo. The hospital's attorney objected to Byrne, saying he is not a pediatric neurologist.

Byrne is the co-editor of the 2001 book "Beyond Brain Death," which presents a variety of arguments against using brain-based criteria for declaring a person dead.

In a phone interview, Byrne said he could not comment in detail because he had not seen any of Jahi's medical records. But the fact that her ventilator is still functioning properly is a sign that she is alive, he said.

"The ventilator won't work on a corpse," he said. "In a corpse, the ventilator pushes the air in, but it won't come out. Just the living person pushes the air out."

Jahi's family says the girl bled profusely after a tonsillectomy and then went into cardiac arrest before being declared brain dead.

Outside the courtroom on Monday, Dr. David Durand, chief of pediatrics at Children's, said staff have the "deepest sympathy" for the family, but that Jahi is brain dead.

The ventilator cannot reverse the brain death that has occurred and it would be wrong to give false hope that Jahi will ever come back to life," he said.

Durand said Jahi's surgery was "very complex," not simply a tonsillectomy.

"It was much more complicated than a tonsillectomy," Durand said. He refused to elaborate, citing health care privacy laws.

Arthur L. Caplan, who leads the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center and is not involved in Jahi's case, told The Associated Press that once brain death has been declared, a hospital is under no obligation to keep a patient on a ventilator.

"Brain death is death," he said, adding, "They don't need permission from the family to take her off, but because the little girl died unexpectedly and so tragically, they're trying to soften the blow and let the family adjust to the reality."

http://news.yahoo.com/teen-ordered-off-life-support-family-appeal-223311842.html

What do you all think of this?

The family thinks that they can pray & God will work a miracle.  Why should He?  

What a strange question for a Catholic to ask!

Nadir, you never do get what I post.  I guess in this case it's because I was too brief.  I wonder if I explain what I mean if you'll understand.  
Some people live mediocre lives until something bad happens & then they pray like they never prayed before hoping for a miracle.  I've seen it so many times.  Not to say that God doesn't work miracles in answer to prayer.  Of course He does.  But sometimes we just need to accept God's will in things and pray simply that His will be done and for us to have the grace to accept the good and the 'bad' that happens to us.  There really are people who think that God will do whatever THEY  WANT and all they have to do is pray.  Life doesn't work that way.  It's sad, I know.

Hopefully God will work a miracle and save this girl's life.  But should we think that God is at our beck and call or should we be at God's beck and call?   That's all I meant.  How is that unCatholic?

There are many cases where patients have recovered after being diagnosed "brain dead".

Here is one: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9223408/Miracle-recovery-of-teen-declared-brain-dead-by-four-doctors.html

'Miracle recovery' of teen declared brain dead by four doctors

 A teenager who was declared brain dead by four doctors has made a "miracle" recovery after his parents asked for another medical opinion, just moments before his life support machine could have been switched off. By Hannah Furness

7:00AM BST 25 Apr 2012

Steven Thorpe, then 17, suffered horrific injuries in a multiple car crash, leaving him in a medically-induced coma and another man dead.
 

Doctors told his family he would never recover and asked them to consider donating his organs before his life-support machine was turned off.
 

Instead, Steven’s father enlisted the help of private GP Julia Piper to check his son again as doctors at University Hospital in Coventry, West Midlands, agreed to let a neurologist re-examine him.
 

Remarkably, he detected faint brain waves indicating Steven had a slim chance of recovery and medics decided to attempt to bring him out of his coma.
 

Just five weeks later, he was discharged from hospital having made a near-full recovery.

 
Steven, a 21-year-old trainee accountant, has now spoken of his progress for the first time and paid tribute to his family and the GP who may have saved him.
 
He said: "My father believed I was still there.

"He expressed his views to Julia Piper and I think she listened very closely to what my dad had said.
 
"My impression is maybe the hospital weren't very happy that my father wanted a second opinion.
 
"I think the doctors wanted to give me three days on the life support machine and the following day they said they wanted to turn it off.
 
"The words they used to my parents were 'you need to start thinking about organ donations'.
"I think that's what gave my dad energy, he thought 'no way'.

"I think if my dad would've agreed with them then it would've been off in seconds.
 
"If my parents hadn't asked for the second opinion, and if Julia hadn't been there, I wouldn't be here today."
 
Steven, from Kenilworth, Warks., was been travelling home from nearby Leamington Spa in February 2008 when the vehicle he was in was involved in a collision with two other cars and a horse that had run loose.
 
The horrific crash left one man dead and the horse was also fatally injured.

Steven was rushed to hospital and surgeons performed a craniotomy to help alleviate any swelling on his brain.
 
But despite the operation being successful, brain scans failed to detect any electrical pulses and he was declared brain dead.
 
Steven said: "As far as I am concerned, living is a full recovery. From how I was to how I am now, I think it's a miracle.
 
"I drive to work every day, I don't think anything is holding me back. There's no point dwelling on it, I just pull my socks up and get on with it.
 
"Hopefully it can help people see that you should never give up. I've had so much positive feedback about it.
 
"If you believe it then follow it, that's the motto. My father believed I was alive - and he was correct.
 
"It's hard for me to even ask my parents about what happened.

"They do cooperate with me because they want me to understand it all but they don't want to be reminded about it."
 
Dr Piper, who runs a private practice in Leicester, said: "They had doctors saying he wasn't going to live but the parents felt there was flickers of response and it wasn't just wishful thinking.
 
"I had this strong feeling that this wasn't right and then eventually I got someone else to look at him and of course it proved to have been the right thing to have done.
 
"It's an inspirational story about never giving up.

"He's a remarkable young man and his recovery has been astonishing."

Since leaving hospital four years ago, Steven has had four operations to reconstruct his face, including having his nose rebuilt and an artificial eye socket made.
 
He also has physiotherapy session to improve the movement in his left arm which was badly injured in the road smash.
 
In a statement, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust said: "The injury to Steven's brain was extremely critical and several CT scans of the head showed almost irreversible damage.
 
"It is extremely rare that a patient with having suffered such extensive trauma to the brain should survive.
 
"However, critical care and other specialist teams continued to support his systems through his critical period and we were delighted to see Steven recover and make progress against all the odds.
 
"He is truly a unique case."

This is why you should never under any circuмstances volunteer to be an organ donor when getting or renewing a driver's licence. I strongly suspect that these criminal "doctors" murder many people who could be saved in order to profit from the sale of their organs. This type of criminal has no compunctions regarding the killing of those who are unfortunate enough to fall into his hands, after all he was taught in his modern university & wholeheartedly believes that they are nothing more than trousered apes, soulless beasts, anyway, why not whack them out if he can get away with it & derive some benefit from it. To refrain would be bad business & we can't have that.

I hear that a nursing home has offered to take the child.  
 

I had been wondering about that.

Just to ward off further ugly comments, I don't believe that a feeding tube is extraordinary means.

Did you really mean "further ugly comments"? I do hope not. If you see my comments as ugly, I certainly did not mean them that way.

As far as I know they were not going to harvest her organs, so that was not the reason that they wanted her kept on a ventilator.  

That is true that we have heard nothing about organ donation through the mass media. But whenever one hears the words "brain dead" one thinks "organ donation". After all, brain death was unheard of before heart transplants. And the defination of so called "brain death" changes from time to time according to the needs of the industry. One must always be wary about this. Their insistence that she is dead while still warm and putrifaction has not set in is very suspicious.

Originally she may have been a prime specimen for harvesting but having had such publicity, they may have had to hold off. We just don't know at this time, but I'd be very surprised if she wasn't considered a valuable source of organs.



http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_24761283/oakland-family-brain-dead-13-year-old-girl

"They keep saying she is 'dead, dead, dead' and I am hoping the courts will say 'no, no, no,'" Dolan said in a Thursday night news conference. "We just saw her; she is a beautiful young lady. She responds to her mother's touch. She is warm."

This is why you should never under any circuмstances volunteer to be an organ donor when getting or renewing a driver's licence. I strongly suspect that these criminal "doctors" murder many people who could be saved in order to profit from the sale of their organs. This type of criminal has no compunctions regarding the killing of those who are unfortunate enough to fall into his hands, after all he was taught in his modern university & wholeheartedly believes that they are nothing more than trousered apes, soulless beasts, anyway, why not whack them out if he can get away with it & derive some benefit from it. To refrain would be bad business & we can't have that.

I had a friend who was a nurse and the ER supervisor of a busy hospital in Sacramento. She told me when we discussed donor tags that she would not do it because 'I want to live.'

I have told this story at least twice here:

I knew a woman who, like this girl, went under anaesthetic and did not recover from it. Things went wrong and she was declared "brain dead". Her husband was pestered by the hospital to agree to donate her organs. He resolutely refused.

Eventually the woman fully recovered - from being dead! - and went on to open a business in the town in which I lived. These events happen more often than the media lets on, and when they get out they are described as miracles.

That they were not dead at all, means that they did not come back to life. The article which I posted about Steven Thorpe says that "He is truly a unique case." But he is far from unique. There are many such cases.

When transplants are done using organs from the "brain dead", the heart is always the last to be taken. That way the other organs stay in better shape. The heart is taken last. These "brain dead" people have to be anaesthetised or they fight off their attackers. Who would ever think of anaesthetising a "dead" person, other than organ harvesters?

This is about the horrific event that any family could go through. Please spread the word. People need to know.


http://www.oltyn.org/page6/page49/page50/2013newlisting2.html

Don’t Give Your Heart Away: the Facts about Vital Organ Transplantation
$5.00

Randy Engel - Long time pro-life journalist. “Like the abortion industry”, she noted, the nexus of the organ donor industry is “cold hard cash”. It is very much a pro-life issue, as the organ donor industry contributes to the further devaluing and degradation of human life. Mrs. Engel explained that for vital organ transplants, it is necessary to kill the donor. “A heart taken from a donor already dead cannot be used. This gruesome practice is now a multi-billion dollar industry. “A healthy beating heart or other vital organs brings in $24,000 and the body of a ‘brain dead’ donor, an average of $70,000.”Mrs. Engel closed urging her listeners to not sign organ donation cards, and to opt out of organ donation programs. There is the real danger that if you would become comatose, and you have an organ donation card, you may quickly be declared brain dead while still alive, and your organs harvested to feed the profits of the multi-billion dollar organ transplant industry.