Woman's Waking After Brain Death Raises Many Questions About Organ Donation
Had no detectable brain waves for more than 17 hours
By Hilary White
CHARLESTON, West Virginia, (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Virginia family was shocked but relieved when their mother, Val Thomas, woke up after doctors said she was dead. 59 year-old Mrs. Thomas, while being kept breathing artificially, had no detectable brain waves for more than 17 hours. The family were discussing organ donation options for their mother when she suddenly woke up and started speaking to nurses. Ethicists have strongly criticised developments in organ donation criteria that would have made Mrs. Thomas a candidate for having her organs removed before she woke up. At 1:30 am Saturday May 17, Mrs. Thomas' heart had stopped beating and she had no pulse when the family called paramedics. She was without a heartbeat or oxygen for 15 to 20 minutes before being put on a ventilator and transported to a Charleston, West Virginia hospital.
An attempt was made to lower her body temperature but her heart stopped three times causing doctors to estimate that her chance of survival was less than 10 per cent. The ventilator was kept running for nearly 18 hours and rigor mortis had set in while Mrs. Thomas' family considered organ donation. The decision was taken to discontinue life support but ten minutes into the process, Mrs. Thomas moved her arm and began speaking to nurses.
Mrs. Thomas is being examined in a clinic in Cleveland to investigate her heart problems.
Physicians, bioethicists and governments continue to debate the issue of brain death criteria for purposes of organ transplants and determining the exact moment of death has been a source of contention since organ transplants became common. Controversy continues to swirl around the issue as patients in apparently hopeless comatose conditions continue to confound doctors' expectations and awaken.
The problem is time and the rapid deterioration of most vital organs after the cessation of heart function. After death, corneas and bone marrow can still be used but soft vital organs such as the heart, lungs, pancreas and kidneys rapidly deteriorate and are unusable within a few hours. Traditional medical ethicists contend that soft and easily damaged organs such as the heart are impossible to obtain morally since they deteriorate more quickly and must be removed when a patient's condition is still disputed.
One of the most recent and contentious developments is the concept of "non-heart beating organ donation" (NHBD) in which organs are removed from a body as little as five minutes after the cessation of the heart function. In a facility where such criteria are followed, had other factors been favourable and given her lack of brain function, Mrs. Thomas might have been pronounced dead and been a candidate for removal of organs as soon as she arrived at the hospital.
The procedure is also known as donation after cardiac death (DCD), and typically involves a person who requires a ventilator and, while having measurable brain function, is determined to have no hope of recovery. After this judgement is made, doctors remove ventilation from the patient and wait for the heart to stop beating. If the heart stops for five minutes, death is pronounced and the organs are harvested by another surgical team.
The definition of "brain death" also remains controversial, but DCD is even more contested since the method leaves little time for ethical considerations. With "brain death" organs can be harvested at leisure since machines keep air flowing into the lungs and blood circulating; with DCD the stoppage of the heart necessitates very quick harvesting as organs deteriorate without blood flow.
Doctor John B. Shea, medical advisor to Canada's Campaign Life Coalition told LifeSiteNews.com that DCD does represent a potential threat to comatose patients.
Donors for DCD are chosen, he said, not because they are dead, but because their organs are particularly desirable for transplant. Dr. Shea said in a 2006 interview, "The typical scenario for such organ harvesting is a young person between the age of 5-55 who is in good health, is in intensive care due to an automobile accident and is on a ventilator. The doctor makes an arbitrary decision that treatment is futile."
"Those donors are known not to be brain dead but are usually first in a coma and the doctor decides treatment is futile."
See dramatic YouTube video of news report on Thomas's return from brain death
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=zbaiC9N6bGU&feature=user
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Controversial Organ Donation Method Begins in Canada - Organs Extracted 5 Minutes after Heart Stops
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/jun/06062707.html
Organ Transplant Doctor Investigated in Non-Heart Beating Donation Case
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/mar/07030903.html
Assisted Suicide Bill Passes California Assembly
Democrats voted for the bill, Rebublicans voted against it
By Tim Waggoner
SACRAMENTO, (LifeSiteNews.com) - An assisted-suicide bill that allows doctors and nurses to suggest death by unconscious dehydration has barely passed the California State Assembly.
AB 2747 would authorize total sedation without nutrition and hydration for depressed and confused patients, whether or not their natural death was imminent. The bill would also allow family members to order the death of a mentally disabled person when a nurse opines they have less than a year to live, similar to Terry Schindler Schiavo's death at the hands of her husband.
AB 2747 passed the Democrat-controlled Assembly Wednesday afternoon on a 40-32 vote, a one-vote margin of victory in the 80-member lower house. The vote was virtually party line, Democrats for, Republicans against. AB 2747 is authored by the same Democrats who unsuccessfully carried physician-assisted suicide bills for the last three years.
"This deceptive bill will cause death and shorten life, despite its claims," said Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families, a leading California-based pro-life, pro-family organization. "Drying up and shriveling to death through dehydration is a fate worse than lethal injection. By transforming palliative sedation into a vehicle for assisted suicide, AB 2747 would transform doctors and nurses from healers and comforters into killers like Dr. Jack Kevorkian."
AB 2747 would allow a doctor or a nurse to opine that a patient has "less than one year to live," and then ask depressed patients if they would like to be totally sedated into unconsciousness. Total sedation is usually an irreversible procedure that does not include nutrition and hydration. If patients or decision-making family members fall prey to suggestions of total sedation, death from dehydration will usually occur within five days.
This is the fourth time that the assisted suicide bill has been pushed by Assembly Democrats Patty Berg and Lloyd Levine. But this year, instead of proposing to have doctors administer lethal injections, AB 2747 aims to produce death by sedation abuse, a clear violation of life-affirming medical ethics. Until now, total sedation has been used only when death was imminent - within hours or days - and when strong pain medication was not enough. Medical ethics require that food and water (nutrition and hydration) not be removed when sleep-inducing drugs are used, since doing so would cause unnatural, as opposed to natural, death. Yet AB 2747 pushes total sedation even if patients have not rejected food and water.
"Just as the assisted-suicide bills of the last three years have been rejected, so should the California Legislature reject AB 2747," said Thomasson. "Assisted suicide by total sedation ignores the sanctity of human life and violates life-affirming medical ethics. People who are ill need support, spiritual care, and counseling if they're depressed. But AB 2747 would ensure the death of innocent Californians at the hands of an increasingly unscrupulous insurance industry that regards people cheaper dead than alive."
Dr. Howard M. Ducharme is past chair of the philosophy department at the University of Akron. On January 24, 2002, Dr. Ducharme participated in "The Debate over Total/Terminal/Palliative Sedation," sponsored by The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity (http://www.cbhd.org/resources/endoflife/kingsbury-ducharme_2...), where he detailed how total sedation prematurely kills people:
Total sedation (TS) -- called by some "terminal sedation," "palliative sedation," or "slow euthanasia" -- is a protocol recently added to the lexicon of contemporary medical interventions and is a construct actively promulgated by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO). It is defined as "the application of pharmacotherapy to induce a state of decreased or absent awareness (unconsciousness) in order to relieve the burden of otherwise intractable suffering." With only this much said, there may seem to be no ethical objection to TS -- a patient who is terminally ill, imminently dying, and suffering overwhelming physical pain may simply request temporary TS to get some sleep today with the hope that the pain will be endurable tomorrow. However, any quick acceptance of TS would be ill-advised because of the many "devils in the details."
TS is not limited to patients with terminal illness who are imminently dying. The NHPCO's policy explains that TS can be used "in the last day or two of life," but it can also be used "at multiple points" in a "patient's trajectory toward death," when the patient is not imminently dying. Thus, TS is not limited by standard clinical criteria as put forth in the AMA's policy on forgoing life-sustaining treatment (FLST) -- i.e., that the patient be terminally ill and imminently dying.
TS protocol allows that the sedation may be "partial or complete," and that it can be initiated as a temporary and reversible sedation. There is no problem with this application of sedation; however, TS policy does not limit the time frame, or require reversibility, of sedation. Though the NHPCO states that "[TS] need not be considered irreversible," TS can be titrated to produce a "complete unresponsiveness of patients" with the "intent" to provide "deep sedation until death occurs, without concern for reversibility." When a permanent TS treatment is administered upon the patient's directive, it cannot be revoked; no totally unconscious patient will ever have the opportunity to reverse her directive, say, to look at the face of a loved one just one last time. By contrast, when a DNR order is in effect, it can be revoked by the patient at any time. Absolute final farewells must precede permanent TS -- just as in an act of euthanasia.
TS protocol also allows that any concomitant therapies may be added to the TS patient's protocol, each "based on their own merits." Thus, a terminally ill patient (e.g., an HIV+ or early-stage ALS patient) who is not imminently dying can be given TS concomitant with a decision to forego (withhold or withdraw) life-sustaining treatment (FLST). When the patient's life does depend upon the continuation of life-sustaining treatment, the cause of his death may be ambiguous. Would the immediate cause be regarded as FLST and not at all dependent upon the active interventions of TS policy? What if such a patient refuses to forego life-sustaining treatment without first undergoing TS? In such a scenario, TS is necessarily implicated in the immediate cause of the death of the patient. Such a context carries TS into the frontiers of euthanasia. Furthermore, TS plus concomitant patient decisions can place TS squarely in the arena of euthanasia, e.g., when a TS patient elects to have her organs harvested per the Non-Heart-Beating Cadaver Donor Protocol. Here the result is an act, elsewhere argued, of "thrift-euthanasia."
Another troubling aspect of TS is that strict respect for patient autonomy is compromised on several fronts.
According to the NHPCO, "When patients do not have [autonomous] capacity, their designated decision-makers may make the decision on their behalf." This element of TS policy dissolves two fundamental boundaries set up to protect patients. When irreversible TS is deemed appropriate by family members (third-party, outside observers) of a non-competent patient, TS is then administered as non-voluntary or involuntary TS -- on a parallel with non-voluntary and involuntary euthanasia. Additionally, TS decisions made by substituted decision-makers will not be based on first-hand descriptions of the level of suffering experienced by the patient. Rather, they will be mere inferences based on observations and value-laden evaluations of onlookers -- who may have low pain thresholds and/or high sensitivity to the perceived suffering of others. Family members may (or may not) have the best of intentions, but they are nonetheless incapable of knowing for certain whether or not the patient has crossed over from tolerable to intolerable distress, the supposed symptom required for TS.
The ugly reality is that irreversible TS may too often be treatment given to a patient for the comfort of the family.
If the patient does want to die, then TS will be readily accepted. If she does not want to die, then simply being approached to consider TS will communicate to her that she must be a burden on others and/or that her life just cannot be worth living any longer. Such reflections by the patient may be exactly enough to shift an individual's suffering from bearable to unbearable.
The psychological distress added to the patient's life by others initiating this conversation may be the existential push that takes them over the TS cliff. Furthermore, when TS becomes hospice and hospital policy, it will be incumbent on the agency to inform all patients of their TS options at admission. Therefore TS policy adds significantly to the so-called "culture of death" mentality already inundating society.
Lastly, given the details unpacked above, a health care team can initiate the discussion of TS of an incompetent patient with family members and carry it out all without any patient involvement. This is a dire and shadowy way to end the lives of others via paternalistic, non-voluntary, existential euthanasia.Belgian Legislators Seek to Legalize Euthanasia for the Unconscious and Children
By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman
BRUSSELS, (LifeSiteNews.com) - A group of legislators in Belgium is seeking to expand the practice of euthanasia to include those who are unconscious, as well as minors, according to a recent article in the Spanish newspaper Hoy.
The initiative, spearheaded by former Senator Jean-Jacques de Gucht, was originally launched in 2004 and failed, the article states.
The new proposed legislation will allow people to create a type of "living will" that will allow doctors to euthanize them if they are unconscious and unable to give consent.
While euthanasia has been legal in Belgium 2002, the existing law has prohibited the practice under the above-mentioned circumstances.
Doctors who refuse to kill their patients under the law will be required to refer them to a doctor who is willing to do it, reports Hoy.
Related LifeSiteNews Coverage:
Euthanasia Rates Escalating: Kills One a Day in Belgium, Five a Day in Netherlands
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/apr/05042202.html
250 Belgian Pharmacies Offer Euthanasia Kits
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/apr/05042809.html
BELGIUM LEGALISES EUTHANASIA
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2002/may/02051704.html
