[Magdalen] Alfie Evans has died

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

I read of a case where a child was declared brain dead, and yet the parents
did not want to take her off life support. They felt they detected some
signs of response.  An independent person came in and also detected signs
of sentience, and so continued to ask similar questions over and over in
order to see if the responses were a fluke or a valid response to the
questions. He concluded that there was some thought process going on.

The hospital refused to allow her to remain there because they maintain
that she was dead. The parents managed to get another hospital to take her,
and there was a nurse there who was bullied by other staff, like, "How can
you perform procedures on that dead girl?"

The young woman has been stabilized and moved to an apartment. Cue the
questions of who is paying for this, since I don't really care about that
stuff...

The implications for organ harvesting are not lost on the med staff.  The
possibility that they are harvesting organs from a person not yet dead, is
horrifying and virtually unthinkable.

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 11:43 AM, ME Michaud <michaudme at gmail.com> wrote:

> There was an article in the New Yorker recently:
> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/what-does-it-mean-to-die
>
> The suggestion that physicians, men and women who cherish their own
> intelligence, would think a non-thinking person is not alive, has stayed
> with me.
>
> I also remember my shock at hearing a physician say he’d never medicate a
> patient so heavily that the patient was unable to pray. Protocols be
> damned, I guess.
> -M
>
>
> On Monday, April 30, 2018, Jay Weigel <jay.weigel at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > me that doctors never have all the answers. Also, this was a black child,
> > and the hospital did not take into account, apparently (nor did the legal
> > system) the feelings and attitudes of African-Americans toward death and
> > the dying process.
> >
> >
>