ARS on Twitter
RSS
Don’t Compare Terri to Tirhas
Posted by Raven on March 17th, 2006
Commentor Timmah brings to my attention a story about a Texas woman who had her ventilator removed…and this story is making it’s way across the lefty blogs as a comparison to Terri’s fight. They are not even remotely similar and it’s typical of the left to leave out basic facts. To yell and scream about these things is good. To bring them out in center for attention is good too. But to use ability to pay or race or immigration status as an excuse for removing the vent is wrong. Get the facts straight folks before you all fly off the handle and land assdown looking like idiOts.
A family has gathered to mourn a woman gone too soon. Tirhas Habtegiris was an East African immigrant and only 27 when she died Monday afternoon. She’d been on a respirator at Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano for 25 days. “They handed me this letter on December 1st. and they said, we’re going to give you 10 days so on the 11th day, we’re going to pull it out,” said her brother Daniel Salvi.
First of all anyone on a vent cannot speak. They have a huge tube in their throat which makes speech impossible. These tubes are uncomfortable and patients who require them are almost always sedated because they often try to pull them out themselves.
The statement from the hospital:
Ms. Habtegiris was not conscious at the time of her death and was not consistently conscious after the first few hours in the hospital. The medical record reflects that she was given morphine for severe pain shortly after arriving in the Emergency Department, and she was further sedated when she required mechanical ventilation shortly after admission to the hospital. From that point forward, she was never again able to speak because of the tube in her windpipe (trachea), and she was never able to meaningfully communicate by other means because she required ongoing narcotics for pain and sedatives for anxiety and agitation.
As I thought. As is typical for patients on vents.
Even though her body was being ravaged by cancer, this family says Tirhas still responded and was conscious. She was waiting one person. “She wanted to get her mom over here or to get to her mom so she could die in her mom’s arms,” says her cousin Meri Tesfay.
She may have made this wish known prior to being placed on the vent. If so, her family should have made arrangements for her mother to get here in time. This woman had been DX with the cancer for a while at the time of admission to the hospital. The terminal status had been known as well. They had time. And if you read the statements from the medical records the hospital has released we see they actually tried to help the family with getting her mother to the US.
Ms. Habtegiris was already sedated for her comfort as noted above. Her grieving family no doubt did not want to see her removed from the mechanical ventilator and perhaps this caused them to perceive that their loved one was suffering when she was not. However, both medical professionals and the hospital chaplain (who tried to help the family cope with their grief) noted that Ms. Habtegiris died peacefully. The statement that she “suffocated” for 16 minutes is false.
In my own experiences with patients who are removed from vents, they are almost always sedated to the point where one would never know they even needed to be on the vent. There is no grasping for air, no dramatic last moments so many would like us all to believe. Morphine is the drug of choice for these situations. For pain.
Morphine has a side effect though: It reduces respiratory function.
It was medically inappropriate, on scientific grounds alone, for Baylor to go along with the family’s request to maintain the ventilator indefinitely for Ms. Habtegiris (whose lungs filled each day with more and more cancer), to provide CPR at the moment of death, or to provide a lung transplant. More importantly, it is outside the ethical standard of care of both physicians and nurses to keep a suffering patient alive merely because of others’ belief that it is never appropriate to stop any medical treatment.
It’s absurd to even consider performing CPR on a patient who has lung cancer. It would kill them. It wouldn’t help.
And lung translplants don’t work when we have cancer in every other part of our bodies. The vent was keeping this woman alive, for sure, but it wouldn’t have kept her alive for long. Her cancer had most likely spread to her brain, where the functions of life are controlled. She would have been truly brain dead but kept alive via ventilations from a machine. How’s that for quality of life? The sad facts here are she had cancer, which was spreading more and more every day. The ventilator cannot stop this. If anything, it keeps the cancer alive and not her.
Her family feels caught in America’s health insurance crisis.
“And it’s kind of a shock to me too to experience this in this country. It’s the richest country in the world. Very sad,” Salvi said.
No this is not the case here. When I first read the article Timmah sent in comments I was pissed off. A simple Google of this story shows a lot more was involved here. Funding issues? I was surprised to see that brought up. Being America, the land of entitlements and free healthcare for the poor, I was shocked that this was an excuse. ALL people get care, no matter the ability to pay.
The medical record reflects that the hospital never raised payment issues with the family. As is routine for all patients without private insurance who might qualify for public assistance, the family was given contact information to apply for Medicaid. The medical record clearly reflects Medicaid would pay for the patient’s hospital care.
Medicare will pick up these costs no matter what. No matter what the political spectrum we each have, the fact is America will pay for the healthcare of everyone. No matter what their immigration status or ability to pay.
So using payment sources or the lack of, doesn’t gel here. It doesn’t matter. Her care was paid for. Period.
March 17th, 2006 at 4:32 pm
Well, darn that devil in the details, or the absence of details. I would like to clarify, I am sorry the slaves were mistreated. Life is precious. I do not feel any personal obligation, though.
March 17th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
I think you’re missing the point of why I brought that story to your attention. The reasoning behind it isn’t that I feel this is arbitrarily some great injustice done to this woman, it is to demonstrate that these kinds of difficult choices are made every day in hospitals, but don’t get the attention and outrage that someone who didn’t even have a functioning brain got.
You can’t stamp “culture of life” on everything and make it easier to live with when these sorts of things happen, the choice to continue treatment and life should be the choice of the individual, the family and the doctors. It shouldn’t be fodder for every right leaning blogger from here to Denmark and back.
I’m not saying me, you or Ralph Nader for that matter should make those decisions, but you, on the other hand, have rabidly advocated extending life in every case I’ve seen you examine, except it seems, this one. It’s a perfect example of the way people pick and choose their battles when they brand themselves “pro-life” with no exceptions. That’s the kind of double think I’m trying to demonstrate.
March 17th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
Timmah I am not picking and choosing whose life is more valuable. All life is.
When I did the google search I found a link to KOS, who claimed this woman was JUST LIKE TERRI…the fact is they have nothing in common. Terri could have lived another 40-50 years, she did not have a horrible terminal illness like this woman had. Being on the vent would not have kept her alive but it would kept the cancer growing even more…and cause more pain for her. I am an advocate for Hospice care, palliative care- end of life care that is so important. Pain and suffering do not need to occur.
The comparison of this woman to Terri is wrong. People need to get their facts straight.
The more we think about this the more I think, suspect here, is the family just didn’t GET it. They were pushing for things that were not going to help.
Terri’s husband had been pushing for her death for years so he could re-marry and KEEP the money she won in a lawsuit. That he did.
March 17th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Or maybe he just got tired of seeing his now braindead wife lying in a hospital bed for over a decade.
Just because doctors could have kept her heart beating for 40-50 more years doesen’t mean she’d be living for that amount of time. She stopped being alive when her higher brain functions stopped years ago.
I don’t see how it’s a radically different situation depending on what you consider life to be. Terri Sciavo had zero chance to recover her lost brain matter. None.
Just as the person in my example had no chance to recover from her illness, but at least in the latter situation, she was able to think and see.
March 17th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Actually the woman with cancer was much more subdued than Terri was, due to the medications she was given to relieve her pain. When they tried to wean her off some of the meds, she was able to communicate her pain level as being extraordinarily (sp?) high.
It’s sad, both cases. One was going to die shortly and the other wasn’t…
March 17th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
Yeah but Terri Sciavo had no higher brain function. Don’t you get it? One was able to have process stimuli cognitavely and one wasn’t.
Being a urine and feces factory doesen’t qualify as my definition of living.
March 17th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
I meant to type “One was able to process…etc”
March 17th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
I know what you meant and I think I understand your points. BUT, my belief is it is not up to us, humankind, to deny other humans food and hydration when it is readily available as they did with Terri.
I do believe we should stop pain and suffering when it is happening as with Tirhas…and the vent started out as a comfort measure but ended being just the opposite.
I’m not a religious bible thumper either. I’m not religious at all.
March 17th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
I didn’t say you were religious. A truly religious person wouldn’t cast as many stones as you do, so I had allready assumed this.
My question to you, then, now that we properly understand each other, is how long do we keep someone alive who has been examined and found to be in an irreversible vegetative state? Because as far as I’m concerned, over a decade of watchful waiting is probably enough.
No one was denying food to someone who needed it. Without that tube jammed into her stomach, the autopsy proved she didn’t even have the necessary reflex function intact to swallow on her own.
People die from hunger every day, most of them have nothing wrong with them medically. Are we any less complicit in their deaths because we refuse to allocate the necessary resorces to help them develop infrastructure?
The point I’m trying to get across here is that there are plenty of living, breathing, thinking, feeling human beings alive as we speak that die every day, but your energies are devoted to stopping abortions and keeping the braindead breathing. These seem like odd priorities to me, shouldn’t we focus on dealing with the human beings allready in existence, rather than forcing people to bring more unplanned for children into the world?
Why are potential human beings in America more important to you than current human beings in Africa?
To further drive that point home, we can take the President’s example. He cut his vacation short to return and interfere with the Terri Schiavo situation. Later, He continued with his vacation during Katrina, one of the biggest natural disasters in the country’s history.
The bottom line is Terri couldn’t see, she couldn’t think, and she couldn’t feel. At least in any approximation science is aware of. So why make a martyr out of her?
Considering that an eating disorder is the likely cause of her heart failure, one can be fairly certain she was a self conscious individual before the incident. One can then follow that line of reasoning to it’s logical conclusion, that she would be horrified at the spectacle made out of her situation by republican politicians to score votes.
March 20th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
*crickets*
I know you’re here Raven…
Why don’t you grow a pair and answer?
March 20th, 2006 at 6:42 pm
Hey I worked all freakin weekend. I need to sleep sometime.:evil:
March 20th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
“The bottom line is Terri couldn’t see, she couldn’t think, and she couldn’t feel. At least in any approximation science is aware of. So why make a martyr out of her?”
Noooo you are wrong once again. She was able to think…this is a HUGE misconeption among people who don’t work with this population. Her thought process was certainly at a low level, but her abilty to smile and cry and move her eyes with stimulating subjects SAYS there was a connection. Of course she could FEEL things to. She wasn’t paralized for chrisakes!
March 20th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
Hate to play “Nuh-uh you’re wrong” but the autopsy says the vision centers in Terri Schaivo’s brain were *dead* that proves she was blind and was not responding to stimuli.
You’re a nurse right? Maybe you should pick up a text book and look up “persistent vegetative state”.
“A persistent vegetative state (commonly, but incorrectly, referred to as “brain-death”) sometimes follows a coma. Individuals in such a state have lost their thinking abilities and awareness of their surroundings, but retain non-cognitive function and normal sleep patterns. Even though those in a persistent vegetative state lose their higher brain functions, other key functions such as breathing and circulation remain relatively intact. Spontaneous movements may occur, and the eyes may open in response to external stimuli. They may even occasionally grimace, cry, or laugh. Although individuals in a persistent vegetative state may appear somewhat normal, they do not speak and they are unable to respond to commands. For more, see: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/coma/coma.htm”
DR. RUSSELL PORTENOY (neurologist and chairman of the Department of Pain Medicine and Palliative Care at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York)”A patient in a persistent vegetative state can appear to have a normal level of consciousness with alertness and with normal sleep cycle but they have no content of consciousness. They don’t experience emotion. They can’t think. They can’t interact with the environment. They have no memory. So the persistent vegetative state is actually a very difficult condition for caregivers because the patient can look as if he or she is awake and interactive but there’s really no… nothing left of that person there.”
Any more stuff to make up “nurse” Raven?
March 20th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
That link is 404 now btw, but it links back to the national institute for neurological disorders, it’s just the first thing that came up in google.
March 20th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
That assessment was from ONE doctor.
ONE. I realize there were several MD’s who said these things but it’s funny how the voices of so many other docs have been hushed up. It’s funny how these MD’s were all paid by Terri’s hubby to “assess” her.
It’s funny how so many docs who saw Terri’s medical records and brain scans questioned the one or two doc’s DX…
persistent vegetative state- is an awful term that just doesn’t equal the actual condition the very DX people with this are in.
March 21st, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Actually that was a statement from the national institute for neurological disorders, followed by the testimony of one of the most respected neurological doctors in America.
You’re wrong. Just admit it.
March 21st, 2006 at 7:29 pm
No Timmah. These people are speaking about what they know- Terri was not in that state.
I had contact with nurses and aides who worked with Terri and there were alot of things being said that were not truth.
A big cover up has occurred to.
April 24th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
[...] I really hope it’s not like this. It would be way too soon to remove this woman from life support and I really can’t see it the way this article writes it. A similar situation popped up a couple months back, involving a Texas hospital and a “life saving” debate. Until the details came out. Seems some like to use these situations as a basis for bashing the former Govenor of Texas, George Bush, currently our President. [...]
April 25th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Dragging up conspiricy theories now are we? Time to get the tinfoil hats on.
Because clearly if the facts dont agree with your conclusion, the facts must have been manipulated by someone.