A few snippets from the article:
“They gave her some medication, but they didn’t do any tests, didn’t do any CT scans. If they did, they would have caught it,” Newkirk said.
Who said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? How much would the CT scan have cost?
Smith ended up being taken to the hospital where she worked. A CT scan revealed multiple blood clots in her brain. Unfortunately, there was nothing doctors could do, and Smith was declared brain dead.
A mother and wife lost because the hospital wanted to skimp out on the diagnostic that might have saved her.
More than 90 days later, Smith’s family, including her young son, is still by her side as she remains on life support, but they say they weren’t given any say in her case because of Georgia’s heartbeat law. The law bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically around 6 weeks into pregnancy.
90 days out of a possible 220 or so days. How much has it cost to keep her alive since her brain death, and how much is it going to cost to keep her alive for 130 more days? And remember, it’s not just $, but emotional health for her boyfriend, mother, son, and anyone else not mentioned/interviewed.
“She’s pregnant with my grandson, but my grandson may be blind, may not be able to walk, wheelchair bound. We don’t know if he’ll live once she has him,” Newkirk said. “It should have been left up to the family.”
And all of this for a baby that is likely to suffer major medical issues due to gestating in a brain-dead, possibly otherwise compromised body, hooped up on medication and other medical intervention to preserve the body’s life long enough for the baby to be born, possibly severely compromised itself.
Newkirk says she wants people to understand the human toll of Georgia’s law and the emotional weight of being stripped of medical decision-making during a crisis.
But of course Cons don’t give a shit about this. Woman dies, leaving behind a son, mother, boyfriend, and countless friends? Nah, that’s not important. BABY MUST BE BORN, no matter how injured gestating in a body like that will make it, making the baby a burden on other people, because GAWD’S WILL and bullshit like that. :|
Does anyone in the entire process ever just wonder… Are we the baddies?
So as a doctor working in an intensive care unit, we even know we’re the baddies sometimes. We’ve had people quit over that. Pretty hard to fight the system and take people off of live support. I’m in Austria and the laws are pretty different here. Best thing we can do if we think a patient isn’t benefiting from more life prolonging interventions is to do an “ethic council”. There a bunch of different doctors who don’t work at the same unit and a lawyer get together and decide what to do. Still we had some people rotting to death in our unit. Also people on life support where we knew we could never get them out of intensive care and just prolonging their suffering. In the end some kind of infection will take them. But we’re just prolonging their suffering and their families suffering who are trusting us. Horrible situation all around. And the thing is we do that because the surgeon in charge doesn’t want them to die because then the surgery will be considered failed In statistics. So we keep them alive for 30 days… I’m still in training so can’t really change the system just make people as comfortable as possible with painmedication and sedation until they’re allowed to die. (Usually after 30 days so the surgery is seen as successful)