TX Hospital Pressures Parents to Withold Treatment from Comatose Teen

THREE days after their teenage daughter went in to a coma following surgery, doctors started pressuring Sabrina Lopez' parents to withhold treatment and feeding.

From "Doctors vs. Parents: Who Decides Right to Life? by Chris Vogel, posted 5/1/08 at Houstonpress.com:

Lopez and Murray say that doctors and hospital staff began pressuring them to withhold treatment and feeding, which would ultimately starve Sabrina to death. To the parents, this was unacceptable. They wanted their daughter to live.

"I was very disappointed with the way Memorial Hermann handled things," Lopez says. "They put it out on the table that we were being selfish."

Murray and Lopez accuse the hospital staff, doctors and nurses of doing everything they could to try to end Sabrina's life during the ensuing six weeks, including:

• Refusing to implement simple procedures such as giving Sabrina feeding and breathing tubes that would have enabled the parents to take their daughter home and care for her themselves,

• Attempting to turn relatives and friends against Lopez and Murray by encouraging them to persuade the parents to withhold treatment, all the while violating federal privacy laws by discussing Sabrina's healthcare information,

• Entering two separate do-not-­resuscitate orders against her parents' wishes, and

• Threatening the family with convening the hospital's ethics committee, which under Texas law can overrule the family's wishes and withhold life-support treatment from a patient.

"It was like we were caught in a bad dream," says Murray. "We couldn't believe this was happening."

Lopez and Murray allege that the hospital staff did not properly monitor Sabrina's sodium levels after the first surgery and did not give her the fluids she needed that they say would have prevented the strokes. Instead, doctors and nurses kept giving Sabrina morphine, a drug known to deplete sodium.

As Lopez and Murray saw it, the hospital and physicians that caused their daughter's condition were now trying to end her life. And it seemed like there was nothing they could do to stop it.

Bioethicist Wes Smith comments, in a recent blog post:

This is a long story but very important to read. Sabrina awakened and is now living with her disability and cared for by her parents. And while I can't take a position about this particular case, I can say I hear from such desperate families on a continuing basis from all over the country. Futile care needs to be stopped.

"Texas is ground zero for Futile Care Theory because of its pernicious law that permits ethics committees to refuse wanted life-sustaining treatment over patient/family objections. Readers of SHS will recall that when such a decision is rendered, families have a mere 10 days to find alternative care, which can lead to desperate situations, as I have reported on several occasions."

Rationalizing the Murder of Terri Schiavo

Bobby Schindler has noted that whenever a supposedly vegetative patient, who doctors were sure would never react consciously again, suddenly regains understanding or "miraculously" awakens the reporters seem never to make the connection to his sister Terri Schiavo...

From "Subliminal Understanding That What Happened to Terri Schiavo Was Wrong?" by Wesley J. Smith, posted 10/15/07 at Secondhand Smoke

...It is as if these reports, to quote Shakespeare, "doth protest too much," as if there is a subliminal realization that a terrible injustice was done to her.

The latest almost unbelievable example is in an otherwise interesting and important (and long) piece in the New Yorker, byline Jerome Groopman. After describing how supposedly unconscious people have been misdiagnosed, the author quotes an unnamed neuroscientist about Terri. From the story:

A neuroscientist showed me a video on the Internet of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who spent fifteen years in what most doctors agree was a vegetative state--tests revealed almost no activity in her cortex--and whose death, in 2005, provoked fierce debate over the rights of severely brain-damaged patients. (Schiavo died after the Supreme Court rejected her parents' appeal of a judge's decision approving her husband's request that her feeding tube be removed. An autopsy showed extensive brain damage.) In the video, a man's voice can be heard praising Schiavo for opening her eyes in response to his instructions, and the neuroscientist told me that he was impressed until he muted the sound. "With the sound off, it is clear that her movements are random," the neuroscientist said. "But, with the voice-over, it is easy to make a misdiagnosis. (My emphasis.)

The above stills are from the video in question. It deeply touched my heart and it is seared forever in my memory. In that video, Terri is asked by the examiner to open her eyes. At first, nothing. Then, within ten or so seconds, her eyes flicker, she opens them, and then opens them so wide her forehead wrinkles. It is clearly an intentional response to the question.

But if you turn the sound off, there is no question to hear--and voila, her opening her eyes with clear intention can now be dismissed as merely "random movement." But a random movement under those circumstances would be to move her head from side to side or lick or lips. But when she opened her eyes, and so intently, precisely as requested, you have to work hard to make it "random." So, to make sure we don't see the terrible wrong that was done to her, we just turn off the sound.

Read the whole commentary.