Re: Global Eye - Body Double

I agree that we are not entitled to "kill" somebody. No one is. However you are not accurate if you think that removing a means of life support is akin to murder. Like you have said, you will live as long as your body allows. Sun Hudson's body was never intended for survival in our world. He would have died immediately if there was not a machine breathing for him from the very first second. Which is exactly what happened when the tube was removed.

That's not to say that removing a person's life support is an easy decision, or always the correct one. There are emotions, ethics, questions, human errors involved. Ultimately it is NOT about the money, it's about doing the best that we possibly can for a person. They attempted to do the best that they could for Sun, give him every opportunity to POSSIBLY thrive, but he never did and he never would. So is it humane to keep him alive? Forget the money, you're right that we pay millions upon millions for the health care of other very sick patients, patients without insurance or without a bright outlook for the future, but we as health care professionals care for them as we would ANY OTHER PATIENT, because that is our job. I take it extremely personally that you assume health care workers would discriminate between patients with lots of money and those with little, and reflect that judgement in the quality and quantity of care that is provided. Nine times out of ten, I don't know whether my patients have insurance or not, whether they intend to pay their bill or not. But I'll treat the drug-seeking homeless addict patient the same as I would the VIP ambassador from Syria, they are all patients to me.

I am not the person to say whether Sun Hudson wanted to live or die, none of us are. In a tiny way the ethics committee of which I spoke has to play the role of God, which in my opinion is not an enviable task. However you would be surprised to learn to very tortuous conditions under which some families presume to keep their loved ones alive. Bottom line it comes down to QUALITY OF LIFE. There was none for Sun. I have absolutely, 100% no doubt in my mind that he was born with a very low quality of life, with a tiny sliver of a chance of ever recovering, and when he did not make progress after several months (a concession the hospital administrators made for his mother, on the off chance his condition might slightly improve) they did the best thing possible for that child, since no medical intervention could have improved his quality of life.

I don't know if he was in pain. I did not see or meet this patient personally. But I can tell you that under most circumstances where a patient, even a baby, is intubated and very, very sick, they will sedate them both out of concern for the possibility of unspoken pain and to keep them calm and not agitated from the tube inserted into their lungs. Perhaps they were trying to keep him comfortable. Perhaps he had brain damage severe enough that experiencing pain or exhibiting pain vocally or phyiscally was not possible for him.

All we can really know is, continuing his life would have worsened the situation. It's not so simple as to leave the tube in day after day and let him keep living. Soon there would be infections; and is it really ethical to aggressively treat the infection of a patient facing iminent death? Any patient under hospice care would not receive treatment for an infection. Soon he would develop a collapsed lung from the overextension of his tiny, underdeveloped lungs by a machine. Soon his body would grow and place a higher demand for oxygenation and blood flow, a demand which his tiny heart and lungs would likely not be able to meet. Soon he would develop pneumonia or a multitude of other respiratory malfunctions or diseases associated with long-term use of a ventilator. Soon, things would become much, much worse.

Nobody should have to make these decisions. Unfortunately, somebody does. Fortunately, those people are highly trained, incredibly knowledgable, supremely humane and kind-hearted. We should all praise their efforts, for surely that is not a job for any of us to envy.