Archives For brain death

Israel StinsonIsrael Stinson was abruptly taken off life support to the devastation of his parents, Fronseca and Nathaniel Stinson.

Perhaps you haven’t followed this story but I have and I am just as horrified as his family is.

You see the long and short of it is the hospital declared Israel “brain dead.” After many court battles Israel’s family moved him to a hospital in Guatemala, where they began to feed Israel and give the family hope.

According to Alexandra Snyder, the families attorney, three Guatemalan doctors, including a neurologist, declared that the boy was NOT brain dead after all.

That diagnosis was based in part on EEG, (electroencephalogram), or other tests used to measure electrical activity in the brain, she said.

Snyder, the families attorney declined to name the Guatemalan doctors or their hospital but dismissed the idea that their opinion weighed less than that of American doctors.

“We’re not talking voodoo here,” she told The Post. “They have access to the same equipment as American doctors. Many of them probably have degrees from American medical schools.”

From Guatemala, the family posted more videos in which they said Israel was improving. After 3 months in Guatemala, Israel was accepted as a patient in Children’s Hospital in LA. HOWEVER, within days the hospital once again went to court to remove the ventilator from Israel.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge removed the restraining order, saying the case had already been decided at state and federal level before the family traveled to Guatemala.

And with that, doctors turned off Israel’s ventilator.

Can you imagine?

  1. Your child pronounced brain dead.
  2. Leave county and improves.
  3. EEG’s and several doctors say your child is NOT brain dead.
  4. LA Children’s Hospital accepts you child back.
  5. You come back ONLY to have the doctor’s go to court and take your child off the ventilator?

I’m sorry but there is something really wrong here. It is the duty of parents to PROTECT their children. 

Please read more details here and here but most of all pray for this grieving family.

“What I really don’t understand is why this hospital agreed to take this little boy in the first place,” she told The Post, saying the boy’s parents never would have brought Israel back to the United States if they had known the hospital was going to pull the plug. “They knew exactly what his condition was, what his treatment was, and they agreed to take him. But it appears they only accepted him as a patient to put him to death. …

Yes, that IS the question, isn’t it?

WHY?

Mirranda Grace Lawson

Mirranda Grace Lawson I spoke to the parents, (Patrick and Allison Lawson) of Mirranda Grace by phone several weeks ago, right after Mirranda had been on life support due to choking on a piece of popcorn. A friend of mine from W. Virginia contacted me.

I was able to connect them to Dr. Paul Byne to help them in their fight to save Mirranda.

Dr. Paul A. Byrne is a Board Certified Neonatologist and Pediatrician. He is the Founder of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in St. Louis, MO. He is Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at University of Toledo, College of Medicine. He is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

Dr. Byrne is past-President of the Catholic Medical Association (USA), formerly Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at St. Louis University in St. Louis, MO and Creighton University in Omaha, NE. He was Professor of Pediatrics and Chairman of the Pediatric Department at Oral Roberts University School of Medicine and Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the City of Faith Medical and Research Center in Tulsa, OK.

Mirranda choked on popcorn on May 11th.  Miranda had a lack of oxygen resulting in her being in an unconscious comatose state but still alive. When a person, especially a young person, is unconscious and on a ventilator, the desire is to get their vital organs for transplantation into others who have a greater lobby.

Within a few days the doctors and hospital were presenting to the parents that Mirranda was “brain dead.” However, they could not confirm “brain death” without doing the crucial and lethal apnea test.

On Thursday, June 9. After the judge heard the testimonies, the judge said he would rule on Friday, June 10. His ruling was that the doctors and the hospital could carry out the testing and evaluation at their discretion.

The judge heard testimony that the removal of the ventilator from Miranda could only harm her and possibly kill her. Yet he ruled that the doctors and the hospital could remove Miranda’s life support.

Parents you must be fully informed and armed with the truth before such a decision is forced upon you at the time of greatest distress.

Part of every declaration “brain death” is the apnea test which is not for the benefit of the patient.  It is the last so-called “clinical” test to achieve the declaration of “brain death.”     

I know you have heard me loud and clear many times on this blog, and it is the first thing I tell people when they call, DO NOT DO THE APNEA TEST.

The need for a ventilator doesn’t mean the brain is permanently incapacitated or ones’ health cannot be restored!  This “life support” device is a supplement to the patient’s compromised, weakened physical condition and is necessary for providing the patient with oxygen while removing carbon dioxide during the most crucial period. Time and continued medical care are necessary for the ongoing treatment to protect and preserve the patient’s life. The ventilator provides the patient and physician this valuable time as it eases the patient’s distressed respiratory system allowing time for therapy and healing.     

Knowing full well how critical the ventilator is, to withdraw it when it is needed most is absurd! Yet, it is planned for the patient to be taken off for up to 10 minutes – the patient can only get worse! This test is sometimes lethal. Make sure to instruct all medical staff:  “DO NOT DO AN APNEA TEST!”

Associate Professor Cicero Galli Coimbra, Head of the Neurology and Neurosurgery Department at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazil has completed the study, “Implications of ischemic penumbra for the diagnosis of brain death. Apnoea testing may induce rather than diagnose brain death”.[20]

The study discovers that where there is brain damage there may be an area of the brain that is destroyed plus an uninjured section (even if there is no apparent function) and between the two a penumbra where brain cells are not functioning but recoverable. In severe cases a person may be wrongly declared “brain stem dead” or “brain dead”.

Coimbra’s research shows that the testing for “brain death” both delays treatment for the patient and that the actual apnoea test may bring on that state.

Coimbra CG (1999) Implications of ischaemic penumbra for the diagnosis of brain death. Brazilian J Med Biol Res; 32:1538-1545 Study available athttp://www.unifesp.br/dneuro/brdeath.html… Accessed 8 May 2007

 Professor Coimbra echoes this wisdom with a knell of mourning:

“… a review of the literature shows that some of even the most severely head-injured patients (GCS of 3 or 4, with pupils fixed to light) who are not subjected to apnoea may recover to normal life. Early labelling of these patients as dead (for transplant purposes) during the past 3 decades has diverted medical researchers away from developing novel therapeutic resources that could already have saved many thousands of human lives throughout the world.”[30]

The family has set up a GoFundMe page for Mirranda. If you can’t donate please pray for the Lawson family and Mirranda Grace.

Success stories of people declared brain dead waking up.

 

 

Source: Judge rules OK to stop ventilator for 10 minutes

Dr. Paul A. Byrne

Dr. Paul A. Byrne is a Board Certified Neonatologist and Pediatrician. He is the Founder of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in St. Louis, MO. He is Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at The University of Toledo, College of Medicine. He is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

Dr. Byrne is past-President of the Catholic Medical Association (USA), formerly Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at St. Louis University in St. Louis, MO and Creighton University in Omaha, NE. He was Professor of Pediatrics and Chairman of the Pediatric Department at Oral Roberts University School of Medicine and Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the City of Faith Medical and Research Center in Tulsa, OK. He is author and producer of the film “Continuum of Life” and author of the books “Life, Life Support and Death”, “Beyond Brain Death,” and “Is ‘Brain Death’ True Death?”

Dr. Byrne has presented testimony on “life issues” to nine state legislatures beginning in 1967. He opposed Dr. Kevorkian on the television program “Cross-Fire.” He has been interviewed on Good Morning America, public television in Japan and participated in the British Broadcasting Corporation Documentary “Are the Donors Really Dead?” Dr. Byrne has authored articles against euthanasia, abortion, and “brain death” in medical journals, law literature and lay press.

Bernice Jones

Bernice Jones is a mom, who lost her son Brandon to Brain death and like me only later found out what brain death was. A legal fiction used to get organs from injured people not yet dead.

Yesterday, I was interviewed with Bernice at Radio Maria’s “The Quest for a Culture of Life in America with Steve Koob,Director One More Soul and Host for “The Quest for a Culture of Life in America”. (The video below is NOT the interview) 

William WilberforceThe Interview

Below is an interview that Dr. Paul Byrne and Bernice Jones did last week on another show. In the interview, you will hear exactly what I have been “trying” to say for years on this blog.

I know it is a bit long but well worth an hour of your time.

 

The most important thing you can do FIRST is DO NOT let the hospital do an Apnea Test. This is the first thing I advise parents who call me or their friends.

Dr. Cicero Coimbra said, “A large number of brain-injured patients, even in deep coma, can recover to lead a normal daily life; their nervous tissue may be only silent, not irreversibly damaged, as a consequence of a partial reduction of the blood supply to the brain.” (This phenomenon, called “ischemic penumbra,” was not known when the first neurological criteria for brain death were established 37 years ago.)

Dr. Yoshio Watanabe,a cardiologist from Nagoya, Japan concurred saying “that if patients were not subjected to the Apnea test, they could have a 60% chance of recovery to a normal life if treated by hypothermia. (deliberately induced cooling)

 

What is your passion?

Passion being something that keeps you up at night, that you research and pray about and give your whole heart to.

I have discovered over the years that passion is the driving force that can change things for the better. Unfortunately many times it comes about because of suffering. In the midst of suffering, you discover something you didn’t know before.

I’ll tell you the truth you can’t be passion about a lot of things because there are only so many hours in the day.

Dr. Seuss quote When you have passion you CARE… an awful lot.

Like Dr. Suess says in one of his book quotes, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Brain Death

Obviously, my writing this blog I care about the controversial definition of death. I care that people don’t understand when they go into the DMV or Secretary of State office and sign up to be an organ donor they are giving consent to something they don’t understand.

Informed consent is an ethical concept—that all patients should understand and agree to the potential consequences of their care—that has become codified in the law and in daily practice at every medical institution. Informed consent is a process for getting permission before conducting a healthcare intervention on a person. The ONLY time it doesn’t apply is if the patient does not have the mental capacity to decide.

Hence, in organ donation the patient is unconscience and can not make that decision. This is where the organ donor card comes into play. If you have signed to be an organ donor after death then that becomes a legally binding contract that is enforceable should you not be able to make that decision.

The problem is further exasperated by the fact that you were NOT told the legal definition of death. Like most reasonable people you thought dead meant dead, and who cares what happens to the body IF you are really dead. You came to believe that death meant no breath, no circulatory response.

U S Definition of Death and what they use to pronounce you dead.

“An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of ALL functions of the ENTIRE brain, including the brain stem, is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.”

I will point out to you that this legal definition of death says irreversible cessation of the ENTIRE brain.  But, that rarely is the case as there is usually some parts of the brain that continues to have blood flow.

There are two other area’s that I have become passionate about 1) mandatory vaccines and 2) the corrupt foster care system in America.

I am not against all vaccines and I am not against the fact that some children need to be removed from abusive homes. What I am against 100% is the government telling us we have to vaccinate to have our children in school. I want informed consent to be presented in ANY and ALL decisions we have to make concerning our bodies.

Vaccines

I am against the government telling us we have to vaccinate to have our children in school. I am against the fact that parents are not informed on what is in the ingredients (adjuvants) in every vaccine.

I don’t blame doctors for this as they are only taught about scheduling in med school. I read a VERY disturbing report over the weekend. It is actually the minutes from an FDA meeting in 2012. I am going to link here as it is 80 pages long. The essence of the report is the discussion in using human tumor cell lines in vaccinations.

Excerpts from the 80 page FDA Meeting on Human Tumors for Vaccine Manufactures

Meeting notes of FDA“I think there’s a brave-new-world aspect to this that we have to deal with. I think we have to tell providers about it in a way that they get it. I think we have to tell the public about it in a way that they get it. But I’m convinced after hearing the data today and the discussion today that these cell lines are important in continued development of vaccines.”
“I’m not a regulator, so I will say just what I think in reaction to the comment about putting comments in a package insert about tumor cells making tumorsin which vaccines were made. I would say, from a personal opinion, that you would have tobe very careful about the degrees of separation between where the stuff comes from andwhat you are putting in the vial that the package insert is describing. It’s not at all related, in a certain sense. I’m not 100 percent convinced that whether or not a cell makes a tumor in a nude mouse has anything to do with the safety of a vaccine that ends up getting made.”
“There are concerns we have. It’s a really interesting intellectual discussion. When it gets right down to what’s in the vial and what the patient is going to ask me about, whether it’s safe, I’m not going to back and say, well, you know, HeLa cells kill nude mice.” 
Now what is interesting about the nude mice, is that they only keep them for a year. If the mouse doesn’t get the tumor in a year then the mouse is killed. Why is that? Well it costs too much to keep them so they said.
“Just one more thing to add there. There is also, especially with the nude mouse, a rate at which tumors will spontaneously form. The longer you keep the animals, the more likely you are to get results that are very difficult to interpret. Part of this is the fact that the rate of spontaneous tumor generation goes up with age. But if you were to hold the animal that long, then you would be obligated to investigate those tumors, for most of which you might not be able to come up with a clear idea of why they occurred because of that background tumor rate.”
“If they are going to get a tumor with aninoculum of a high dose of an immortalized cell, they will usually get a tumor in six months.Beyond that, they start getting skin disease. They are very expensive to maintain. They have spontaneous tumors. Lots of things happen that make it impractical.
So there’s a limit to just watching them forever, just in case you pick up that last tumor. Dr.Peden’s point about “so what”— if you get out there at a year and an animal pops up with a tumor,you probably will spend $10,000 trying to find out that it was a spontaneous tumor.”
Here is the FDA entire meeting notes. It took me a few days to read it in its entireity.
Folks, I DID NOT say all this it is in plain black and white for you to read the discussion and make up your own mind. 
I am a mom of 5 and I vaccinated all my kids from 1979 to 1990. I still have their records. The first four children had 6 before age of 5. My youngest had 8 before age 5. Now children have 36 before age 5.
When we lost my granddaughter at 13 weeks due to SIDS, I started to look into SIDS and stumbled across a vaccine connection which led me to look into other vaccines, adjuvants in them and the harm done to children.
William Wilberforce Shocking and I mean shocking. 
Isn’t it a comforting thing for all of us to know that the FDA approved the use of human cancer cells (“human tumor-derived cell lines”) in vaccine manufactures?
Why has this NOT been publicized to the public?
In fact, at the FDA hearing held at which this technology to employ “eternal life cells” in vaccine manufacture was approved, the VRBPAC Chair, Dr. Robert Daum, spent probably 30 minutes in discussions regarding how exactly to keep this fact SECRET from the American public, e.g., let’s describe these cells as “cell tissue cultures,” not as human cancer cells.
What are you passionate about? I would love for you to tell me what it is and why in your comments?
`Missy

 

Jamie CaulkThis was really hard for me to read as this is what they said about Jamie and a blood clot in the basilar artery from his auto accident. The doctors told us that the blood clot showed where the stroke occurred.

Oh, how I wish I knew what I know now about the lie of brain death. It is so hard to speak intelligently when you just don’t understand what the legal definition of death is. I guess this is why I write to give other families a chance to understand when they say your child is dead.

In an article from the May 6, 2016, Newsweek Magazine entitled, “Given the right stimuli, brain activity in patients in persistent vegetative states can bear similarity to non-injured people,” author Don Heupel highlights two separate but related issues related to serious brain injuries.

Maggie Worthen was a week away from graduating from Smith College in May 2006 when she suffered a massive stroke. Her classmates found her unconscious on the floor of her dorm room, unable to speak or move.

A CT scan revealed that the stroke in the otherwise healthy 22-year-old was brought on by a blood clot in the basilar artery, a critical blood vessel in the back of her head that supplies oxygen-rich blood to the brainstem, the part of the brain that controls the body’s basic life support system. It took 12 hours before neurosurgeons at the closest trauma center were able to remove the clot and restore blood flow to Maggie’s brain.

“They told me most people don’t survive these kinds of strokes. If she made it through the next couple days, it was almost certain she would have no meaningful recovery,” says Maggie’s mother, Nancy Worthen.

As Nancy grappled with Maggie’s prognosis, she felt pressured to make some harrowing choices. One doctor advised removing Maggie from the ventilator and letting her die. Another suggested foregoing the insertion of a feeding tube and tracheotomy that would help Maggie breathe. A representative from an organ procurement organization approached her for consent to transplant Maggie’s organs.

But Nancy resisted them all, believing in the resilience that had always defined her daughter.

MRI's and CT scans can not determine consiciousnessDr. Joseph Fins, chief of the division of medical ethics at Weill, says Maggie’s experience and that of others like her raise troubling questions about how people with serious brain injuries are diagnosed and cared for. “Patients like Maggie are routinely misdiagnosed and placed in what we euphemistically call ‘custodial care’ where they have no access to any treatments that might help them recover or give them a chance of engaging with others,” says Fins, even as research suggests that 68 percent of severely brain-injured patients who receive rehabilitation eventually regain consciousness and that 21 percent of those are able to one day live on their own. A recent post made on www.sideeffectsofxarelto.org about brain blood clots demonstrates a truly somber attitude to victims of such injuries.

Dr. Joseph Fins interviewed Maggie’s family along with over 50 other families in similar situations. Almost all their stories shared a common thread – that the injured person was immediately “written off” and families were asked to make “what he calls ‘premature’ decisions about their loved one—such as whether to withhold or withdraw care or to consent to organ donation.”

(Yes that is the choice)

Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College, says even one person wrongly diagnosed when they have intact mental life is one too many. “Imagine being conscious in a body in which you have no control. It’s difficult to imagine anything more terrifying.” He attributes misdiagnosis to a number of factors, chiefly neglect. “Society as a whole has given up on these people. When somebody is not waking up, it gives people an uncomfortable feeling. It’s easier to say, ‘Nope, they’re not there.”

(And those that believe there is HOPE have their claims and faith disregarded)

EEG tests have shown that brain injured patients can demonstrate consciousness undetectable in a bedside test. And because the technology is portable, cheap and doesn’t require a patient’s active participation.

(We asked for and didn’t get the EEG)

“There are a lot of people out there who could be helped but aren’t,” says Schiff. “All patients should be treated as if they too have that same potential for recovery.”

(Oh this is my hope and prayer) 

Read more details at Source: Brain Imaging Scans Show Some Vegetative Patients Are Living on the Edge of Consciousness by author Don Heupel