Fire on Hearts

What sort of void of conscience and humanity must exist in a medical professional to have the capacity to help extend life and to willfully deny the patient and patient's family even a scintilla of hope? How could those charged with preserving and protecting life so blithely take any opportunity at life away?

Goliath Versus David

The state is powerful and bureaucracy is all-consuming. The individual is small and at mercy of the state. There remains a force more powerful though than the state.

Overturn the Overreach

The US Supreme Court has the opportunity to prevent Obamacare from swallowing our very lives and freedom. Let us pray the justices do their duty and uphold Constitutional restraint before all-encompassing cradle to grave dependency government comes to crush us.

Law Unto Themselves

What if an institution existed that had a multi billion dollar endowment, was the recipient of billions more in government grants and largess, produced many or most of the supposed "leaders" of this particular community (including judges and lawyers), and even incorporated within its leviathan ranks the region's most prestigious law school? Would it be an easy thing to find representation to take on such an institution, even in a case where their conduct was outrageous?

An Unholy Alliance

If Obamacare is upheld by the US Supreme Court and goes into full effect, doctors will become either wary or unwilling agents of the state, happy to deny needed care or forced to ration life sustaining measures. Even before Obamacare, for those like my Father who have already been refused treatment that would preserve life, this is not a theoretical discussion, but a battle to preserve the sanctity of innocent human life.

The Judas Doctor

You do not expect your doctor to deliberately seek to hasten your passing. This is an ultimate betrayal. My Father had the misfortune of encountering a treatment team intent not on prolonging his life but shortening it.

The Most Vulnerable

I probably had no reason to worry about medical care, after all I am not a senior citizen, apparently not afflicted by a costly illness, and certainly not utterly dependent. It is an absolute shame and should be a scandal that those who are completely at the mercy of caregivers now have plenty to fear as to what will not be done to keep them alive.

Worthy of Scorn

Medical care that involves rationing undermines the confidence of patients and their families. Once lost, faith in doctors and medical institutions may never be restored. I only hope my doctor has a different motivating ethos than the butchers pretending medicine who killed my Dad.

Time of Fright

I required the services of a physician for the first time since my Father's death was deliberately hastened by his medical team. I was terrified but knew I must be treated. Fear and cynicism will be my constant companions from now on in all dealings with the medical profession.

Republicans Fight Today

The GOP will try to push the Obamacare "death panels" aside in the US House of Representatives today, even though the proposed bill will die in the Democrat-controlled Senate. "Catholic Online" chronicles the good fight here: http://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=45299. I saw what care rationing does first hand- it kills, but until conservatives control the agenda, we are all under the gun.

Along the Way

If the most infirm are denied life-sustaining measures that are the very basics of life including food and water, then only extraordinary and heroic means (which are obviously more costly than nutrition and hydration may prolong life), and if this life support is withheld as well, the only outcome, the certain outcome is death. This is precisely the fate that befell my Father.

In the Cards

If Obamacare is upheld by the US Supreme Court and if the plan is fully implemented, then regardless of what is eventually listed as the cause of death on your death certificate, there is a great possibility that your actual cause of death will be care rationing. Ultimately, if the Obama plan takes hold or a plan similar to it is instituted by Mitt Romney (as in Massachusetts' Romneycare), then America's most medically-dependent are bound to pay the price.

War Against Elders

Certainly, the aged are less able than they were at the peak of health but that does not mean they should be targeted because they no longer carry their own weight, but must be protected by the society that they were instrumental in creating and that now owes them a debt. How expensive is it to provide nutrition and hydration to anyone?

Stacking the Deck

In a power play between a major university hospital and a patient and the patient's family, the family is at the mercy of the institution that holds all the cards. Who could have imagined that a major medical center would seek out a legal justification to kill a patient? My father was treated like a death row inmate but unlike a guilty prisoner awaiting execution, my Dad did not have recourse to seek pardon or clemency from the Governor or have years of stays provided by the courts.

Mark Your Targets

How could doctors allow themselves to be transformed into "regulators" (used in the Old American West context here) for the state? Since when is it a physician's job to finish off patients? In my simple state, I had the evidently quaint and jejune and now outdated notion that the medical profession was charged with attempting to make those they treated better.

As We Age

As we head to our golden years, will we be appreciated for a lifetime of contribution or thought of as a burden, perhaps to be rid of as expeditiously as possible? Will the sunset of our lives be a time where we have society return some of what we put in to it to make those closing days as comfortable as they can be, or will we find the very basics of life (including nutrition and hydration) stripped away from us to speed our passing?

Matter of Time

Saying a patient will be denied care because the patient only has a short time left becomes self-fulfilling prophecy as even the strongest will die if hydration is denied Is a hanging bag of fluids so costly that American hospitals no longer provide this most basic provision for sustaining life.

Against the System

I had the opportunity to speak to a doctor of pharmacy who works in a hospital setting in Tupelo, Mississippi. I was informed that hospital personnel around there are generally pro-life with very few liberals and that if a family decided to put "grandpa on life support, he might outlive his grand kids." Woe that Dad was sick in a hospital filled with the sordid machinery of death and under the care of heartless apparatchiks.

Why Deny Care?

Beyond avoiding the actual cost of treatment for an American senior citizen or someone on the disability rolls, the successful imposition of medical futility policy saves Social Security and Medicare from ever having to issue another check for that individual. A cynic might even contend that by refusing life-sustaining measures, a doctor has become an agent of the US Treasury.

The Circling Vultures

Run little man as fast as your old legs will carry/ But you can not run for you are as a death row prisoner but in a hospital/ How could this be?

Gulf of Despair

Imagine what it must be like to see the recurring image of doctors refusing to try to save a patient, saying they would do "nothing" to sustain the patient's life, and as the patient might still be saved with prompt intervention, standing with their hands behind their backs, looking at their feet. I do not have to imagine it, I have the burden of remembering what happened to my Father every moment.

Finally- a Victory

Wesley J. Smith relates an all too rare win versus the culture of death with an Idaho law that I only wish had been put into effect in Tennessee in time to protect my Dad. Read the good news on Smith's blog here:http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2012/03/01/idaho-poised-to-ban-futile-care-medical-discrimination/. Every state should pass similar legislation to protect these most vulnerable patients from being killed under the imposition of futile care.

Old Gray Beard

Is sagging skin a testament to the wisdom of experience or proof all use is gone? Are wrinkles in the furrowed brow a badge of honor to a life well-lived or an easy target? Does Grandpa sport a gray beard or a bullseye?

Saving the Aged

How sick do the aged have to be before they are simply forced out on an ice drift or buried alive in a mass grave? What type of society would leave their elders to rot?

Just Killing Time

With resources supposedly dwindling, it is the most vulnerable who will be written off first. I had once heard that what you do to the least of these yo do "unto Me". Failing to prolong life that could be preserved is already here.

Relaying the Facts

Hospitals are no longer a refuge or sanctuary but a place where the utterly defenseless can be targeted for extermination. If you were not gravely ill (or having elective surgery or a baby), chances are you would not be in hospital, and if you are gravely ill, chances are you will be incapacitated and unable to leave, making you a virtual prisoner of the hospital. I consider it horrific that you now have to hope your hospital has a reverence for life (which used to be self-evident).

Conduct So Outrageous

Is chronological age the only determining factor in whether we will receive life-sustaining treatments or have that care denied? Would Grandma Moses have had medical treatment withheld from her simply because she was aged?

Finishing Off Patients

What a feeling of satisfaction a surgeon must have knowing his skilled hands have saved a patient's life. How can a so-called palliative care physician ever feel anything but utterly useless, knowing that they never will experience the satisfaction of saying "I saved that patient". I always had the quaint notion doctors and hospitals existed to sustain and preserve every individual human life if at all possible. My Dad fell prey to the same "care" a race horse receives if it breaks a leg on the track. I will always be filled with revulsion over the brutal treatment we and he suffered at Vanderbilt.

Pulling the Plug?

My Father was not on "life support" as most would conceive of it, only intravenous hydration and a feeding tube through which he was nourished. Vanderbilt took away those very basics of human survival, thereby causing death faster. If we had starved and dehydrated Dad to death in the home, we would rightly be facing prison. The recent Liz Klimas article in The Blaze on Australian ethicists pondering killing babies after birth ends with a statement on the ethically-accepted and common practice of dehydrating the persistently unconscious to death. My Father was not unconscious, in fact he was lucid Saturday before Vanderbilt finished him off on Sunday.

Did You Know . . .

Did you know doctors could ignore your advance medical directive? Were you aware physicians are allowed to go against your Living Will if you actually want them to fight for your life? Did you know doctors can overrule the wishes of your surrogates (family) and take away measures including food and hydration without which the patient can not survive? My family knew none of this until Vanderbilt medical staff orchestrated and hastened my Father's demise.

Save Our Souls

Most of the people with whom we have discussed my Father's passing have never heard of "futile care policy". They are blissfully unaware that their lives and those of their loved ones are now possibly subject to be forfeit as victims of "medical futility policy". My mother and I are serving as a signal beacon as Mom said, "as warning not mourning".