Write a Summary About This Story Please I Need Help !?
Question by : write a summary about this story please i need help !?
The baby died last winter. It was pretty terrible. Little Charlotte (not her real name) lay on a high white bed, surrounded by nurses and doctors pushing drugs into her veins, tubes into her trachea and needles into her heart, trying as hard as they could to take over for her failing body and brain. She was being coded, as they say in the ICU. It had happened several times before, but this time it would fail. Her parents, who were working, weren’t there.
Charlotte was born with too few brain cells to do much more than breathe and pull away from pain. Most of her malformed brain was wrapped in a sac that grew outside her skull and had to be surgically removed to prevent immediate death.
Her parents were a young, unmarried couple from Haiti. They loved Charlotte and wanted her to live. The nurses and doctors thought she should be allowed to die peacefully. They recommended that a Do Not Resuscitate order be placed in Charlotte’s chart. The new parents disagreed. Surely, they thought, medical care in the United Sates could save their baby. They bought their daughter a doll.
For 16 months Charlotte bounced back and forth–between hospital, home, the ER and pediatric nursing homes. Wherever she was, every time her body tried to die, nurses and doctors staved off death. Each time, Charlotte got weaker.
Charlotte’s medical team at the hospital asked to talk with the Ethics Advisory Committee and, as the hospital’s ethicist, I got involved. Is it right to keep doing painful things just to keep Charlotte alive a little longer, her doctors and nurses asked us. To whom are we most obligated: the patient or the family? The committee advised that in this case the parents’ rights superseded the caregivers’ beliefs about what was right. Painful procedures should be avoided, the panel believed, but the care that Charlotte’s parents wanted for her should be provided unless there was a medical consensus that it would not prolong her life. Such a consensus was elusive. There’s almost always another procedure that can be tried to eke out a little more time until the patient dies despite everything–as Charlotte did.
A week after Charlotte’s death, I met with the doctors, nurses and therapists who had done everything they could for her and yet felt terrible about having done too much. We talked for almost two hours about how Charlotte had died.
“It was horrible,” said a doctor. “We tried to resuscitate her for over an hour. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I actually felt sick.” A nurse talked about the holes that were drilled in Charlotte’s bones to insert lines they couldn’t get in anywhere else.
Why didn’t Charlotte’s parents spare Charlotte–and us–the awfulness of her death? Because they were too young? Too hopeful? Because they were distrustful of white nurses and doctors who they thought might really be saying that their black baby wasn’t worth saving? Or because they believed that a “good” death is one in which everything possible has been tried?
Why didn’t the hospital staff, including the ethics committee, save Charlotte from that kind of death? Maybe we feared that her parents would take us to court, like the mother in Virginia who got a judge to order the hospital to provide lifesaving treatment for her anencephalic baby, who was born without most of her brain. Maybe we were afraid of seeing ourselves in the news–as the staff of a Pennsylvania hospital did when they withdrew life support, against the parents’ wishes, from a comatose 3-year-old with fatal brain cancer. Maybe we were thinking about what was best for the parents, not just the child. Maybe we were wrong.
The nurse sitting next to me at the meeting had driven two hours from the nursing home where she used to care for Charlotte. She had attended the wake. She said the parents had sobbed; that Dad said he felt terrible because he wasn’t there when his little girl died, that Mom still couldn’t believe that she was dead.
It could have been different. They could have been there holding her. That’s the way it happens most of the time in ICUs today. Family and staff make the decision together, machines are removed and death comes gently.
As a hospital ethicist, a large part of my job is helping staff and families distinguish between sustaining life and prolonging death. Sometimes I join the staff, as I did that night, in second-guessing decisions and drawing distinctions between the dignified death of a child held by parents who accept their child’s dying, and the death that occurs amid technologically desperate measures and professional strangers.
Sooner or later, every person will die. I wish, and the hospital staff I work with wishes, almost beyond telling, that people could know what they are asking when they ask that “everything” be done.
Best answer:
Answer by Rebecca B
Not really an answer but I’d doubt the bub’s parents age or background is really responsible for or explains much in your story.
Stereotypically, it is parents who are a) very young, b) poorly educated or c) religious who tend to opt for compassionate care (i.e. letting their baby die without any medical intervention). Such parents don’t tend to go down the route of aggressive treatment. My guess’d be if this is based on fact it was a misguided belief that anything and everything is possible in the “great” US of A.
My mum was told to make the choice between compassionate care or trying to save me when I was born. Obviously she went for the latter; a choice that meant leaving her family, friends, job and home with only 4 hours notice to move to the opposite side of the country. I did the multiple surgeries, planed and emergency, multiple resuscitations, in and out of CICU like it had a revolving door ( it became a joke that I was ‘allergic’ to friday afternoons as time and time again in the first 6 months of my life I would be relatively stable all week and then collapse and have to be resuscitated and taken back down to Intensive Care on a friday afternoon!) Four times during the first 6 months of life my parents were given the option of switching off the machines and letting me die peacefully in their arms. Four times they said ‘no’ (mainly cuz my mum is incredibly stubborn and pig headed and suspected I was the same) and now nearly 14 years later I’m still here. I’m still alive and kicking at almost 14 when kids born today here in my adopted country (UK) are still being dismissed at birth as hopeless, incompatible with life and it not being in the interests of the baby to even try and save them.
So, ultimately, it is virtually impossible for anyone, parent or medical staff to know which way these scenarios are going to go whilst they are still ongoing.
Give your answer to this question below!
Do you need inpatient drug treatment? Charlotte- watch this – Hear from the caring professionals of our recovery network in this video. Each of our four centers for inpatient drug treatment, Charlotte, offer the comfort, compion and amenities to heal your body, mind and spirit. When addiction occurs with psychiatric issues you need more than medicine or therapy- that is why we combine treatments for comprehensive recovery. Call for help today.
Two plead guilty to distributing drugs in Vermont
Filed under: Charlotte Drug Treatment
The indictment stems from a Vermont Drug Task Force investigation that authorities say featured several controlled drug purchases. The case also included the seizure of 193 bags of heroin when Scripps-Carmody's 2006 red BMW was stopped on Interstate 91 …
Read more on BurlingtonFreePress.com
Ontario delisting OxyContin and its substitute from drug benefit program
Filed under: Charlotte Drug Treatment
By Megan Ogilvie Health Reporter Ontario is delisting the prescription painkiller OxyContin — and the drug that will soon replace it — from the province's drug benefit program. The change, revealed Friday, is an attempt to curb an addiction epidemic …
Read more on Toronto Star
Public health chair: opiate addiction not a disability
Filed under: Charlotte Drug Treatment
“Is opiate addiction a handicap,” Erickson asked? “I don't think opiate addiction counts.” Kitsap County Commissioner Charlotte Garrido, board of health member and 2011 chair of BOCC, said she too needed to better understand opiates and other drugs.
Read more on Central Kitsap Reporter