A Thwarted Dehydration
I have been watching this case since it first hit the news in Arizona. On May 30, Jesse Ramirez was arguing with his wife when their SUV rolled over. He was left unconscious. The doctors said his case was "hopeless," that he would never wake up. The wife moved him to a hospice and had his feeding tube removed, that is, she decided to dehydrate him to death.
The parents objected. They obtained help from lawyers affiliated with the Alliance Defense Fund, and obtained a court order requiring sustenance to be maintained while the case was investigated.
And now, this news:
Two weeks ago, he was the center of a family battling over of whether he should live or die.Now, he can hug and kiss, nod his head, answer yes and no questions, give a thumbs-up sign and sit in a chair...Jesse is now ready to move from a hospice to a rehabilitation facility.
"We have had a lot of miracles," said Betty Valenzuela, Ramirez's aunt. "He would have been gone."No, it wasn't miracles: It was a family that refused to give up on their loved one. It was a judge who didn't just decide that the wife had the right to pull the plug, especially given certain potential conflicts of interest in the case. It was the Alliance Defense Fund that was willing to step in to the breach and help a family in desperate need.
I also think that if Ramirez's doctors really called his case hopeless, they have a lot of explaining to do. As we have discussed here previously, PVS is often misdiagnosed. More importantly, it can't be done accurately after only a few weeks post trauma. So, why the rush in this case to write the man off?
This much is sure: But for parents willing to fight for his life, Ramirez would be dead today rather than entering the rehabilitation unit. And therein lies an important lesson for us all.
Labels: Jesse Ramirez
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:40 PM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
Mrs. Ramirez: He's dead. Yank his feeding tube.
Mr. Ramierz: I'm not dead yet.
Mrs. Ramirez: Hi, Honey! No hard feelings, right?
His attorney in their upcoming divorce will have a field day with this.
One of the early stories reported that doctors said he "would be blind." Now of course a motto "better dead than blind" is horrific in itself, but I can't help being curious as to whether that turned out to be false, too. None of the recent stories has reported. I perhaps shouldn't make an argument from silence, but I wonder if they would have mentioned it if he _is_ blind and if the implication is that he isn't.
Lydia lives!
Answering yes-or-no questions is a bigger deal than you might think. I learned this when my mom had a stroke a few years ago. It affected only her language and she recovered nicely, but the yes-or-nos took a couple of days longer than "name this object". (Wonder why that is.)
Hey, Don,
Yes, I haven't disappeared. Just haven't been able to think of anything much to say on the threads here lately for some reason. I've been blogging elsewhere, though.
So, why the rush in this case to write the man off?
It's perhaps noteworthy that he was "arguing with his wife". It seems these cases have been interesting or written about because of the spouse versus parents angle, more than the "is it OK to remove the feeding tube" angle. Because surely there are thousands of cases each day where a feeding tube is removed, or kept in, and we just don't hear about it because the spouse and parents were in agreement.
Now that marriage is seen as a sort of temporary status based on ongoing consent of the spouses, only parent-child bonds are life-long and non-consensual. So parents are increasingly asserting control over spouses.
Not to make it seem like the wife is the bad guy in this case, as I can imagine scenarios involving arguments and threats and violent suicidal, murderous driving that make it easy to understand her desiring that he get his wish rather than having to wake up to see what he'd done.
Abusers do threaten to crash the car, it's a very common form of abuse, and terrifying. If that sort of thing did happen, would it matter?
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