Hi everyone,
I just signed the petition “CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL OAKLAND: Allow a doctor to perform a tracheotomy for breathing and to insert a feeding tube for Jahi McMath – procedures that would be necessary to transfer Jahi to give her a chance to live” on Change.org.
It’s important. Will you sign it too? Here’s the link:
Thanks!
Missy
Here is the Facebook group started on her behalf, I would love to have you join.
Today I watched this video interview from NBC News on a mother who delivered twins. She was told that the boy, Jamie had died. She began to hold him on her chest. The doctors told her his movement was a reflex, same as in brain death. As baby Jamie began to suck breast milk off her finger they called for the doctor who would not come back in.
Only when they told the doctor that they had accepted his death did he come back in.
The rest is history. Not sure if the video will show up but here is the link, watch it.
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He started making movements just five minutes after he had been handed to us, but the movements were just getting stronger and stronger and after two hours, we thought, he’s getting stronger. he’s not dead. eventually, we said to the doctor — he wouldn’t come back. we kept saying, he’s doing things that dead babies don’t do. you might want to come and see this.
he was amazed he was actually alive.
go and tell him that we’ve come to term with the baby’s death, can he just explain it? that made him come back.
The initial interview was done when the twins were five months old, with parents David and Kate Ogg.
Ann Curry did the interview, who I miss terribly on NBC.
A follow up story in March 2012 shows the twins Jamie and Emily growing and doing well.
When I read this story this morning (via a photo on Pinterest that lead me there), I could not help but this of Jahi McMath and her mother Nailah Winkfield, a mother who is fighting to keep her child on life-support to give her time to heal.
Medical miracles do happen and I continue to pray that Jahi will wake up and God will expose the horrific lie of brain death.
The Ogg’s were following a procedure that began in Australia called Kangaroo Care. Skin-to-skin contact with their mothers releases oxytocin, the so-called “cuddle hormone,” which affects multiple areas of newborns’ brains.
Despite the evidence that it works, the medical establishment has been slow to recommend skin-to-skin contact with newborns. Ignorance about the research findings and fear of handling premature babies are two of the main obstacles, say Ludington and Spatz, who works at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“In the United States, our biggest reason is the physicians don’t know about it because it’s nursing-generated knowledge,” Ludington says. “The physicians want to see the data, but they don’t read any nursing journals.”
Fear plays a role, too, Spatz says. “I still see in most NICUs (neonatal intensive care units) that skin-to-skin is not a standard of care.” NICU babies tend to be tiny and fragile and hooked up to tubes and machines, and both nurses and parents worry about trying to move them, she says. Source
One of my big regrets was that I did not get in bed with my Jamie and hold him.
Nailah, if you can get in that bed with Jahi and hold her.
Nailah Winkfield the mother of Jahi McMath wrote an open letter to the world about the nightmare she is going through on behalf of her daughter .
Read the letter in full below:
I am a mother. She is my daughter. I am alive. Despite what they say, she is alive. I can touch her, she is warm. She responds to my touch. I can love her – I can feel her love. When she was in my belly I fell in love with her. Her heartbeat for the beginning of her life was my heartbeat until God, through a miracle, sparked her heart into existence. Given time, I know he will spark her brain awake.
She is Jahi, a name that means known by many. If she knew about all this attention she would blush. She is very shy.
My daughter sits on life support. I feel like she is on death row. The clock is ticking — ticking down. Children’s Hospital Oakland says she is dead. She was not dead when I brought her here on December 9th for a routine tonsillectomy. I put her in their hands, now they want to wash their hands of her.
Jahi had an operation. I was told it went well. Then she started bleeding from her mouth. They gave me a cup for her to bleed into and said it was normal. She bled more and more. I couldn’t keep up with it. I asked for help, they gave me a bigger bucket. She bled more. They did not answer our pleas for a doctor. Her surgeon never came back. She had a heart attack and her heart stopped beating. Then they came — then. They shocked her back into life. Now they say she is dead.
Before the surgery she said I am scared mommy. I said why Jahi? She said I am afraid I won’t wake up. I told her it was going to be fine, it was a simple procedure. I should have listened to her.
She is on a respirator — with air she lives, her heart beats, her kidneys produce urine, she is warm and soft. They have been pressuring me to “pull the plug.” I can’t. I won’t. I can’t let them kill my baby a second time.
I am fighting for her life. Each breath the vent gives her one more chance to live and gets her one step closer to the hospital’s deadline. What a word. I never thought they could tell me, her mother, they were going to pull the plug, take her body to the morgue and send us home on Christmas while she lays in a freezer. She is warm now. I want my baby to be warm. We need time.
The Hospital says she is legally dead. That they can legally stop her breathing. I am not a lawyer. We called many in the middle of the night Monday as they were coming to unplug her Tuesday night. One answered the call. We stopped them. Every day is a struggle. We fight for Jahi. We have a temporary restraining order until Monday – then the Judge can say my baby is legally dead and Children’s can unplug her. It doesn’t matter what I say. I never thought I would have to go to court to get a hospital to treat my child.
Hold your children tight. Tell them you love them. I tell my daughter over and over. I know she can hear me. If she has any brain activity when they do the independent tests she will be kept alive. Pray for my daughter Jahi, pray that she will get better so they don’t kill her. Pray for me, mothers, that my love can bring her life once more.
1) Determination of Death. 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.
The Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) was passed in 1981. By the legal definition of death, she is dead.
Regardless of the UDDA which defined death in the United States Dr. Alan D Shewmon has compiled a list of life processes that brain-dead patients continues to exhibit:
Now do you understand why the family is saying Jahi is not dead?
She still has life processes as Dr. Alan D Shewmon stated.
This debate should have happened long before now. There should have been clinical trials done, animal trials…there was none. The Definition of Death was changed from loss of circulatory and respiratory functions to harvest organs.
We are having that debate now but it is not enough.
Yes Jahi, your name means “known by many” and you are.
You would have to be hiding under a rock not to somehow have been exposed to the story of Jahi McMath, the 13-year-old child who is being pronounced “brain dead” after complications from a tonsillectomy.
Jahi had surgery on December 16th, shortly afterwards she began bleeding and went into cardiac arrest. The doctors at Oakland Children’s Hospital have pronounced her “brain dead” and want to turn off life support.
The family does not believe she is dead and in order to keep her on life support to give her time to heal had to hire an outside attorney to go to court for an injunction.
I have been following the case daily, and am supporting them via a Facebook page that Jahi’s uncle Omari Sealey has started on her behalf.
What a shame that the family had to get a court order to get a second opinion. If your child was being pronounced dead, wouldn’t you think it was your right to have a second opinion by an outside physician?
The story has been complicated by the fact that Children’s Hospital has a protocol that the family can not read the medical records until she has died or been released.
I thought that was funny as she has been pronounced dead by the brain death criteria, which is the legal, medical definition of death added in 1981. Yet, the hospital is not considering that dead enough to let them read the medical records, but dead enough to take her off life support.
The family would like my friend and doctor Paul Byrne to come in and give that opinion. However the family did not have a choice in which doctor to offer the second opinion.The judge ordered a second opinion from a local doctor at Stanford to give his opinion. He may be fine, no one knows but I can’t find any research papers on him writing or commenting on “brain death”.
Dr. Paul Byrne wrote an article here on the situation and I encourage you to read it.
Dr. Byrne has been speaking and writing on brain death for 50 years, in my opinion he would be a better choice to review the records and see Jahi.
Paul read ALL of my son’s Jamie’s records, and no I didn’t even ask him too. He found that Vanderbilt did the Apnea test for 24 minutes, not the typical 10 minutes. We knew the Apnea test was done wrong, they admitted that with the Pco2 was started too high. It should have been started at <40.
Dr. Cicero Coimbra argued: 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.
People HAVE awakened from being pronounced brain dead before even though doctors always blame the tests were done wrong and refused to believe any success stories.
Consider following the families journey on Facebook here.
Most of all join me in praying. To say my heart is breaking for this family is well…an understatement.
Thank you for reading my blog this year, thank you for so many of you reaching out to me, most of all thank you for all the people who have emailed me to learn how to get off the organ registry.
Merry Christmas from my family to you !
A mom sharing my journey since the death of my son and what I learned about the brain death deception.
