Not Terry Schiavo, apparently
Jan. 4th, 2006 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenVia this post from Randy Milholland:
Tirhas Habtegiris was 27 when she died.
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.
Salvi was stunned to get this hand-delivered notice invoking a complicated and rarely used Texas law where a doctor is "not obligated to continue" medical treatment "medically inappropriate" when care is not beneficial.
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.
Ten days was not enough time, they say, to get a mother from Africa to America.
The family and hospital desperately tried to get Tirhas moved to a nursing home but they say no one would take her.
"A fund issue is what I understand. Because she is not insured and that was the major reason the way I understood it," Salvi said.
A statement from Baylor Plano disputes that and says the hospital did its best to comply with the family's wishes in every way.
Still, on the 11th day, Tirhas Habtegiris was taken off the respirator and died.
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.
Experts say there are very few charity beds for ventilator dependent patients in this state. President George W. Bush has said he wants to expand healthcare for legal immigrants in this country.
Here you have somebody who's conscious and able to indicate that they do want to live for a few more days... and where are all the protesters who fought so hard to keep Terry Schiavo on life-support?
Edit: And according to one of the comments on Randy's post, she was conscious when they shut off her ventilator, too.
Tirhas Habtegiris was 27 when she died.
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.
Salvi was stunned to get this hand-delivered notice invoking a complicated and rarely used Texas law where a doctor is "not obligated to continue" medical treatment "medically inappropriate" when care is not beneficial.
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.
Ten days was not enough time, they say, to get a mother from Africa to America.
The family and hospital desperately tried to get Tirhas moved to a nursing home but they say no one would take her.
"A fund issue is what I understand. Because she is not insured and that was the major reason the way I understood it," Salvi said.
A statement from Baylor Plano disputes that and says the hospital did its best to comply with the family's wishes in every way.
Still, on the 11th day, Tirhas Habtegiris was taken off the respirator and died.
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.
Experts say there are very few charity beds for ventilator dependent patients in this state. President George W. Bush has said he wants to expand healthcare for legal immigrants in this country.
Here you have somebody who's conscious and able to indicate that they do want to live for a few more days... and where are all the protesters who fought so hard to keep Terry Schiavo on life-support?
Edit: And according to one of the comments on Randy's post, she was conscious when they shut off her ventilator, too.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-03 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-03 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-03 10:53 pm (UTC)"According to one of the comments...she was conscious." Um, yeah, and Schiavo's family claimed she was responsive, too. I'd want a more verifiable source before accepting this as fact. I don't dispute that it COULD be true, I dispute that it automatically MUST be.
"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..." Ten days was not enough time, they say, to get a mother from Africa to America."
Was this a situation where for 25 days they were unaware she was dying, and then as soon as they realized she was on the downhill road, she was served with the letter? Or did it only become a priority to "wait for her mother to get there" as soon as they were talking about cutting her off?
I know it's nowhere near similar, but we were really really poor a couple of years ago, and my Raven's daughter was killed in a fire in Alaska (which is not cheap to get to, from the lower 48). Thanks be to God, we were able to get assistance from others outside our family in order to fly him up for the funeral, within two days. I find it hard to believe that in 35 days, or even 10 days, no one could approach a church, charity, or anywhere else, and get the money to get this woman's mother to her bedside-- unless there were other issues we're not hearing about.
I'm not advocating denying people healthcare willy-nilly, but seriously, there may be other arguments we're not hearing.
Corrvin
(who will probably ask for "one more story" on the day I die)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-03 11:33 pm (UTC)Agreed, this is why I reported it as "according to..." rather than presenting it as fact. It certainly shouldn't be taken as a critical part of the story.
Was this a situation where for 25 days they were unaware she was dying, and then as soon as they realized she was on the downhill road, she was served with the letter? Or did it only become a priority to "wait for her mother to get there" as soon as they were talking about cutting her off?
The article says she'd been on the respirator for 25 days before she died, so presumably that 25 days includes the 10 days between receipt of the letter and shutting off the respirator.
But I agree, the idea that she could be on a respirator for 15 days before her family realised things were critical does seem rather far-fetched. I suspect some journalistic distortion there; it would not surprise me at all if the family had been working on getting her mother out for a month and told the journalist "there wasn't enough time", and the journalist had inserted the 'ten days' bit.
Thanks be to God, we were able to get assistance from others outside our family in order to fly him up for the funeral, within two days. I find it hard to believe that in 35 days, or even 10 days, no one could approach a church, charity, or anywhere else, and get the money to get this woman's mother to her bedside-- unless there were other issues we're not hearing about.
Possibly a matter of not knowing who to ask - I'm sure there were people who would have been willing to help, but a migrant might not have known where to start, especially if her brother was preoccupied with her treatment.
I'm not sure if the delay was just about money, though. This article makes mention of hiring an immigration lawyer, suggesting that getting a visa might have been part of the delay. Could it take a month to get a visa approved for somebody from East Africa whose daughter hasn't actually died yet? I can believe that.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-04 12:15 am (UTC)I'm sure hope does help some patients recover or live longer than they otherwise might, but false hope makes it harder for somebody who's dying, and their family, to get things in order.
The thing that caught me with my mother's illness, though... there were so many ups and downs. She went into hospital, she came out, she went in, she came out again, every time a little bit wearier and a little bit sicker. I got used to that roller-coaster, and I started to lose track of what 'normal' ever was for her. I had to develop emotional 'shock absorbers' to deal with things, because reacting to every upswing and downswing would have pulled me all over the place, and it made it harder to recognise at the last that this was the time she wasn't coming out of hospital.
If somebody had taken a snapshot of her condition on the Tuesday before she died, and given it to the me of two years ago, I would have recognised immediately that I needed to get down to see her urgently. There were all sorts of things wrong with her; any intelligent stranger could've guessed that she was dying. But we'd had so many crises in the last seven years, and especially the last year, that my reactions were dulled; it took another two days before my brother, who is himself a doctor, realised things were critical. I got down there about seven hours before she died.
Taken without context, it seems nonsensical that somebody could be put on a respirator without their family immediately realising that it was time to say their goodbyes (and as per above, I'm not convinced that they didn't). But if she'd been in and out of hospital a lot before that, it's somewhat easier to believe.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-04 12:27 am (UTC)My grandmother passed away two years ago (the week before Christmas) from leukemia; it was so incredibly fast that she was "feeling pretty bad" on Saturday, in the ICU on Tuesday, and gone on Thursday. I had a few hours of hope on Tuesday night when the extra oxygen made her at least coherent-- but by Wednesday, I knew what was happening, and since she was unable to speak for herself, I spoke for her, and we made her as comfortable as was possible with medical ethics.
(My grandmother's actual wishes, stated to me some 18 years before*, were to be given an enormous amount of morphine and "let go" in a purple haze, but unfortunately, doctors aren't exactly allowed to DO that.)
I know it can be hard to see, from the inside, with all the emotions, what's going on-- all I can really cling to with this story is the idea that maybe her brother and cousin were with her when she passed.
C.
*I highly recommend that everyone have a conversation with their loved ones long before it's ever an issue, of what they'd like done, so that no one feels that they've been pressured. I'm extremely grateful, I suppose is the word, to say that I know the final wishes of my parents and remaining grandparents, and that I hope to live as long as is needed to fulfill them.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-04 12:53 am (UTC)Yup. We did have that conversation with my mother a couple of months beforehand; fortunately, we never really got to the point of having to make those decisions anyway.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-04 07:53 am (UTC)