Yes.
Looks like a combo of tendon contraction with muscle atrophy. I’m not saying her hands are normal, just that such deformity can occur in a living person. Honestly, I’ve seen far, far worse distortion in alive, conscious human beings. Advanced rheumatoid arthritis, for example, can cause much worse distortion, and that example isn’t even the worst it can do. Paralysis, such as after a stroke, can also cause deformity: here’s an example of Volkman’s contracture.
Wow, so we may have another example of a very rare phenomenon that’s been observed in other brain dead children. This could go on a very, very long time. And it really doesn’t answer the question of whether she’s brain dead or not. Children’s bodies really are (sometimes) more resilient than adults, even in death.
One wonders if these bodies might be useful for research. How are they getting nutrition without intestinal linings? Or is their intestinal lining grown back? If so, can we figure out how and turn that into an ulcerative colitis treatment? That would be just one of many things I’d like to explore. But, even were she still at a hospital, it sure doesn’t sound like her mother would allow her daughter’s body to be used for research.
Well, going around talking about how it’s a shame we can’t use her body for research certainly wouldn’t convince her mother either.
Do you really think she’s convinceable, at this point? If she ever was?
Certainly, if I was tasked with talking to her two years ago, I wouldn’t take that blunt tack. I’d talk about how dreadfully sorry I was that this happened, and that her daughter had an opportunity to give a great gift to suffering people by increasing medical knowledge. Or however it is that transplant teams talk to families about organ donation. I don’t know, I don’t do that work.
I know. I was just saying. I found it a little strange and disconcerting that you would even say it here though. Really?
I’m not sure if it is that kids might be more resilient, or just that hospitals are more reluctant to turn off the machines where kids are concerned.
In the case of T.K., for example, he was not formally diagnosed as brain dead because at the time there were no approved standards for diagnosing brain death in children under the age of five, and he was four. (cite) Within two days of his first hospitalization, the doctors had concluded he had no brain activity, but the hospital had no legal basis to declare him dead and his family didn’t want him removed from life support.
T.K.'s intestinal lining never died; he (or whatever remained of him) was fed through a gastric tube.
“Occasionally, I’m callous and strange.” ~ Willow Rosenberg
Thank you for this information, which is all new to me. When this thread was first made, various posters said things to the effect that “Jahi’s body will probably start decaying fairly quickly, and nothing can be done about it.”
But maybe she is brain dead, and they just got lucky in being able to maintain her body in a reasonably-healthy looking state.
Even more so than the real-life reenactment of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” going on in this case?
To be fair, I felt a little strange and disconcerting writing it, rewrote it a few times to try to make it more gentle, then hit the “Fuckit” and “Submit” buttons simultaneously.
I don’t expect every grieving parent to be interested in medical research. But I’m interested in medical research. Without someone allowing their body to be used for medical research, many someones in fact, we wouldn’t have done the research into the ventilators and feeding tubes and adhesive eye patches they’re using to keep this girl’s body going.
So yes, I do think it’s a shame that, if they’re going to the expense and trouble of keeping this body going indefinitely, it’s not benefiting anyone at all. It’s not benefiting the girl. It’s keeping her mother away from her sisters, so it’s not benefiting the family*. It’s not even benefiting future ventilated patients by helping doctors figure out why her body is able to keep from decomposing. I do think that’s a shame, yes.
*Except that I notice at least one GoFundMe in their name is still going. I would venture to guess that may be a motivating factor in keeping the illusion of life intact, but that would definitely be strange and disconcerting.
For some reason this thread makes me think of Kentucky Fried Movie’s United Appeal for the Dead.
If they’re being fed intravenously, is the intestinal lining needed? My mother was in the hospital for three months last year due to an intestinal issue and, while she got most of her nutrition intravenously, she was told to eat at least a little or drink “drinks that have some actual nutrients” (OJ or a bit of vitamin-aA cocktail for example) “in order to help prevent loss of intestinal function”. I’m not sure what intestinal functions were the doctors worried about, if it was peristaltic motions or something else.
No, if they’re being fed exclusively intravenously, they don’t need an intestinal lining. But the fuss when the hospital refused to do two procedures so she could be transferred were for a trach and a feeding tube - a tube that goes into the stomach (or maybe small intestine) through the nose, mouth or abdominal wall. For feeding tube feedings, you need working intestines. Before her body left the hospital, there were reports that she was sloughing the intestinal lining and it was leaking out her anus. Eventually, she got her trach and feeding tube. The latest updates I’ve found from her mother still refer to a feeding tube, but it’s certainly possible they’re giving her IV (parenteral) nutrition and not telling anyone.
Keeping a truly brain-dead person’s body alive may be macabre, expensive, and hard on the loved ones, but you know what’s worse? Killing a child who has a chance of survival.
There have been too many cases of ‘brain dead’ people or people in long-term vegetative states suddenly waking up. It makes me wonder if we really understand what’s going on in the brain at a very deep neurological or biological level.
Examples:
Woman wakes up just before organs were to be harvested
Multiple signs of brain activity were seen, including her lips and tongue moving while she was on the operating table being prepped to have her organs removed. She only survived because she actually opened her eyes as they were about to cut into her.
She was discharged two weeks later and made a full recovery.
Then there’s this recent report:
Uber shooting victim, 14, was declared dead and having her body prepared for organ donation when she squeezed her mother’s hand
The doctors told the family she was brain dead. They signed the consent form to have her organs harvested, and two hours later as she was being prepped for the OR she squeezed her mother’s hand. She can now apparently respond to a request for a thumbs-up by giving one, but there’s no telling how much brain damage she suffered. However, she’s clearly not brain dead.
Steven Thorpe was declared brain dead by four different specialists, and only after the family ignored repeated demands to shut off the life support system, refused to sign the organ donation forms and kept insisting they saw movement that another neurologist was brought in - and found faint signs of brain activity. The kid woke up two weeks later and is well functioning today.
Suzanne Chin was declared brain dead (brain stem death), and again the family refused the doctors repeated suggestions that she be removed from life support. A second neurologist was consulted, who also declared her brain dead. Three days later there signs of some kind of response to stimuli, and within a week she was back home and is now fully recovered.
Zack Dunlap suffered severe brain trauma in an accident. At the hospital he was totally non-responsive. After 36 hours of total lack of response a PET scan was ordered, and it showed that there was no blood flow to his brain at all, and he was declared brain dead. His body was kept alive for four hours while a transplant team could be flown in, and as they were prepping him for surgery he suddenly showed signs of life. The doctors then said he would probably have massive brain damage and might never recover anyway. He was sent to a rehab facility, and made rapid improvement. 48 days later he walked out and went back to a normal life.
Now, I don’t believe that these people were truly brain dead - there must have been some activity in there, some blood flow to keep tissues alive. But it seems to me that current medical opinion may have underestimated the brain’s ability to recover starting from a position of low activity that gets missed on standard tests for brain death. Or maybe all these doctors are quacks, but when four neurologists agree with a diagnosis of brain death and the patient recovers anyway, perhaps we need to consider if we understand this stuff as well as we think we do, and perhaps should be a little more careful before calling the organ removal team.
The doctors are being quoted as saying the Uber shooting victim was never declared brain-dead in the first place. The hospital had discussed the possibility of organ donation with the family in light of the fact that she was very grievously wounded and her heart had stopped at least once, but they were still running tests on her. Moreover, I can’t find any reports where any member of her family said she was brain-dead either. All of the articles saying she was brain-dead are quoting “unnamed sources” or “sources close to the situation” or something similar.
See, that’s a problem with a lot of the reporting. Most people, including most reporters, don’t know the difference between coma and vegetative state and brain-dead anyway, so facts get twisted not because anybody is malicious but because these things are complicated.
Even in the case of Steven Thorpe, the reporting (the actual reporting, not the opinion pieces) doesn’t make clear whether the doctors said he was brain-dead or might be brain-dead, and there’s a pretty huge gap between those statements. You can read different news articles and find quite remarkable differences in what supposedly happened and what the doctors are supposed to have said. The hospital’s own statement doesn’t mention any declaration of death and says only that “several CT scans of the head showed almost irreversible damage … However, critical care and other specialist teams continued to support his systems through his critical period.”
I don’t like bumping…damn, “zombie” is so wrong in this… old threads, but this one seems to be the definitive one on this. I saw that the first item on the 2018 Annual Bioethics Conference schedule is a discussion on the McMath case, did a search find out what happens to her, and came across this New Yorker article. It bothered me on so many levels the comment that the mother made that if the medical professionals had shown some compassion it might gone differently. I’m aware the variance in the way patients feel they are being treated and how medical staff think they are treating people.
It really doesn’t seem like the girl is a “corpse” the way some said she would begin to decompose within months; but it doesn’t feel the same as Terry Schiavo. It will be interesting to see comments from the Bioethics Conference and if it has any impact on the ongoing case.
Huh. I thought the bump was to report she was finally completely dead.
I subscribe to The New Yorker, so I read that article when it came out, and I have to say it was an eye-opener. According to that article, the whole idea of brain death has always been very controversial, and even today is not fully accepted. Nor is the precise definition of brain death well understood.
I haven’t read the story but it sounds like the liability they incurred from the “routine tonsillectomy” that resulted in a brain dead child, is already theirs.
I had the same reaction, and I was one of those people that believed that the chemical balances required to sustain cellular life would fail and she would start decomposing. But seven months after her “death” she started having menstrual periods. According to the article that is suggestive of a functioning hypothalamus.
Now I’m not convinced that there is any cognitive function or awareness there ( her parents would disagree ). But it puts her in sort of a weird legal position - as far as California is concerned she’s legally dead, a corpse. But some of her expenses are covered by Medicaid, because the laws regarding brain death are different in New York and New Jersey. And shortly after the family moved into a rental with Jahi, the police responded to an anonymous tip that “there was a dead body in the house”.
