Jahi McMath 3: Issued Second Death Certificate and Will Finally Be Allowed to Rest

[Tim-Tom Biblethumper]

IF there's a brain left.  Wasn't Terri Schiavo's brain pretty much liquified?  I'm local and should know this, but it's been so long.

[Jug Band Baby]

1 minute ago, Tim-Tom Biblethumper said:

IF there's a brain left.  Wasn't Terri Schiavo's brain pretty much liquified?  I'm local and should know this, but it's been so long.

As I recall, the last scan released showed very little left.  Makes me wonder what Nailha's thinking scientists should study.

[Briefly]

19 minutes ago, Jug Band Baby said:

As I recall, the last scan released showed very little left.  Makes me wonder what Nailha's thinking scientists should study.

That's my thought.  Is there anything left? My opinion is that Jahi has been dead since the initial operation.

I'd forgotten about Terri Schiavo.  There was so much reporting about her parents and their efforts to keep the machines from being turned off, and it seems to me like most of the reports were biased on their side.  I read the book her parents wrote, but I skimmed it and don't really remember the details.  I think it was her parents that wrote it.

[PennySycamore]

@SilverBeach, you might have been confused by my brief description of of why microglial cells do.  

Phagocytosis is a process where certain cells (such as macrophages) engulf or otherwise destroy dead or injured cells or pathogens.  Microglial cells perform this function in both the Central  Nervous System (CNS) or Peripheral Nervous System (PNS).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microglia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phagocytosis

[SilverBeach]

5 minutes ago, PennySycamore said:

@SilverBeach, you might have been confused by my brief description of of why microglial cells do.  

Phagocytosis is a process where certain cells (such as macrophages) engulf or otherwise destroy dead or injured cells or pathogens.  Microglial cells perform this function in both the Central  Nervous System (CNS) or Peripheral Nervous System (PNS).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microglia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phagocytosis

No,not cofused by your description, this is all French to me! I mean confused in the most basic way possible, LOL. Once it gets past saying her brain may have turned to mush, I'm lost. I was a speech major!

[Jug Band Baby]

3 hours ago, Briefly said:

That's my thought.  Is there anything left? My opinion is that Jahi has been dead since the initial operation.

I'd forgotten about Terri Schiavo.  There was so much reporting about her parents and their efforts to keep the machines from being turned off, and it seems to me like most of the reports were biased on their side.  I read the book her parents wrote, but I skimmed it and don't really remember the details.  I think it was her parents that wrote it.

Terri's parents said that her smiling meant she was mentally there and smiling at them, but an autopsy showed her brain had basically dissolved to nothing, and that she didn't have enough left to do anything more than the equivalent of Lazarus signs, like Jahi.  She'd respond to a nerve in her body twitching by whatever the reaction would be if she wasn't alive.  She was so far gone that she may as well have been braindead.  I think it was even determined that she couldn't even feel discomfort anymore.  There was just nothing left, and her body was better off than Jahi's.

[legalbeagle]

I think it's really easy to dismiss the tragedy of this case and to focus instead on the behavior of Jahi's mother and her insistence on keeping Jahi on life support for so many years. That changes the narrative from one of a young girl who died post-surgery into one where a "crazy" mother refuses to accept that her daughter is dead.

Pre-surgery photos of Jahi show a lovely girl with a pretty smile. I am certain she was well loved by her family. I cannot imagine what her family went through while watching her cough up blood, hemorrhage, go into cardiac arrest, and die. 

I hope Jahi can rest in peace. I hope her family can find some peace, too. I know that if my child died, I would never truly get over it and move on; a piece of me would always be missing. But to the extent possible, I hope they can lay her to rest and someday find joy in life again.

[HarryPotterFan]

17 hours ago, Buzzard said:

Except they kept her brain to study, I mean, find a quack as a basis to sue the hospital over.

Her Mom will never let this child go until the gravy train runs out of steam.

How the heck do you preserve an atrophied brain full of spinal fluid?

According to my brother (the one who studied neurobio), after 7 years of being in a persostive vegetative state Terri Schaivo’s brain had atrophied so much it was half the size it used to be. And that’s still being alive, even with limited consciousness, not dead like Jahi. So Jahi’s brain would have atrophied faster. My brother said a brain scan would be interesting from a medical point of view, just for the scientific understanding of how brains desintigrate after death. 

Picture of Terry Schaivo’s brain scan after death under spoiler. You can see the middle of her brain is completely gone and there are cavities in other areas. I don’t believe a brain like this would have the structural integrity to go through the preservation process.

Spoiler

17 hours ago, Jug Band Baby said:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Case-of-Jahi-McMath-girl-declared-brain-dead-13039308.php

Okay, Nailha needs to be barred from filing more cases.  It's so obvious that she's definitely never going to stop.  I think it's a matter of pride.  And she doesn't even know what kind of damage she's trying to cause by trying to make it legal that brain death isn't death.  We have a system that can't handle keeping corpses on support indefinitely.  That's resources that are needed for living people.  Like it or not, when the brain is dead, the person is gone, and all this sort of incredibly expensive theatrical bullshit does is divert resources away from the living so that a family can delay a funeral.

What the hell??? I can’t see this going anywhere. Is the delusions of a woman who is money hungry, delusional, or both versus the entire scientific community.

Edit: Typed out my responses about Terri before seeing the mention of her on this page.

13 hours ago, PennySycamore said:

@SilverBeach, you might have been confused by my brief description of of why microglial cells do.  

Phagocytosis is a process where certain cells (such as macrophages) engulf or otherwise destroy dead or injured cells or pathogens.  Microglial cells perform this function in both the Central  Nervous System (CNS) or Peripheral Nervous System (PNS).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microglia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phagocytosis

I need to figure out a way to remember this...

[Buzzard]

You'd think that, by now, there would have been some scans or findings if her brain indicated anything other than the fact that she's been dead a LONG time.  They'd be screaming on the news if there was any evidence that she was conscious.

[Coconut Flan]

May the whole travesty be over, lawsuit and all.

[dharmapunk]

Finally! What a sad and bizarre story. I hope Jahi's siblings can now move on with their lives. Rest in peace, little girl.

[Jug Band Baby]

2 hours ago, legalbeagle said:

I think it's really easy to dismiss the tragedy of this case and to focus instead on the behavior of Jahi's mother and her insistence on keeping Jahi on life support for so many years. That changes the narrative from one of a young girl who died post-surgery into one where a "crazy" mother refuses to accept that her daughter is dead.

Pre-surgery photos of Jahi show a lovely girl with a pretty smile. I am certain she was well loved by her family. I cannot imagine what her family went through while watching her cough up blood, hemorrhage, go into cardiac arrest, and die. 

I hope Jahi can rest in peace. I hope her family can find some peace, too. I know that if my child died, I would never truly get over it and move on; a piece of me would always be missing. But to the extent possible, I hope they can lay her to rest and someday find joy in life again.

It's BECAUSE of the tragedy that people are so mad at Nailha, as well as her gross misunderstanding of what would likely happen if a judge or jury bend to her just to get her to stop. 

Rather than treat her daughter with dignity, she was determined to treat her daughter's body like a prop to try to get money.  For fact, she had so much in donation money coming in for a while that she was spending it on high-end purses and such for herself rather than saving the money to use for the reason people gave it--to pay for her daughter's post-mortem care.

And if a judge and jury cave just to make her go away, then we will see countless dead people kept on "life support" until their organs finally are so wasted away that the only alternative is a transplant, and it's fucking scary to think about how declaring dead people to be alive could potentially mean they have to be allowed to line up for organs when there's already a shortage.  Treating corpses as if alive will drain the system faster than just about anything, and living people are going to be more likely to die because of having to compete with corpses. 

So changing the death certificate date, which sounds like a simple thing to do just to make a mother feel better, actually has extremely huge consequences.  (Also, CHO would likely have to pay her the cost of all of Jahi's "health care" for the past 4.5 years, even though she herself didn't pay for it--donors did.  So she'd pocket a windfall.)

[seattlechic]

Jahi died YEARS ago. Who in the everloving fuck agreed to "operate" on a dead body to begin with? I can't even with whomever that was, and with the opportunistic free loader shitty mother of this child. I HATE Nailha. She used Jahi as a cash cow, neglected her other children, and is an all around piece of shit. 

 

[Zenyatta]

On 2/4/2018 at 5:20 PM, atlantagirl30084 said:

There was this recent article in the new yorker about her:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/what-does-it-mean-to-die

 

 

This is an excellent piece. Because no doctors or hospitals would be interviewed, this is from the perspective of the mother and grandmother (a longtime nurse). The family is not portrayed as money-grubbers but as people who feel their daughter received lousy care after her tonsils were removed but still was living inside somewhere.   I believe the poor child should have been laid to rest.  But a few points in the story gave me pause.  Twice as many black people as whites want a ventilator because they are wary of doctors deeming them less valuable and wanting their organs for transplant. The transplant issue can be tricky as doctors may seem to  be eager to declare brain death to get organs and not waste time on a very damaged patient.  There are religions and cultures that believe a person remains alive as long as the heart is beating, even with a ventilator.  Finally, doctors and ethicists trying to define death have a real hard time doing it. In some parts of the country, you can be declared dead and in other parts, you can't.  The public ends up paying for the exorbitant cost of care, but if cost becomes the main factor, that's scary.  My brother was hit by a truck while crossing the street. He was 46 and survived the night, but I had to agree to have him removed from a ventilator in the morning. His injuries were massive. His heart stopped minutes after he was disconnected.  I remember the doctor being impatient while I spent the last minutes with my only sibling. I swear the doctor seemed annoyed that I was asking questions.  I don't believe in conspiracies about organs and such, but I do remember how uncaring the doctor seemed. 

[Shadoewolf]

I think it depends on the doctor/hospital. My mom was at Blake in Bradenton, FL in 2016 and we had a moronic resident who tried to talk us out of removing life support even though her GCS never got above a 5 (and sat at a 3 for days after her sedation meds were discontinued) and even if she recovered, which wasn't likely, she would need constant care. Not what my mom would have wanted and we knew it. Her ICU specialists though (attending, respiratory, and nephro) were fantastic and very understanding. Maybe if her organs had been viable it'd have been different but overall very little complaint.

[wild little fox]

21 hours ago, Tim-Tom Biblethumper said:

IF there's a brain left.  Wasn't Terri Schiavo's brain pretty much liquified?  I'm local and should know this, but it's been so long.

Wikipedia Terri Schiavo

There is a copy of the scan here with a healthy brain for comparison. 

[Pecansforeveryone]

I did remember hearing about Jahi hemmoraging after her first surgery and that medical staff ignored the mothers concerns about blood gushing from Jahis nose. While the mother didn't do right in many ways by her children, I have a faint nagging suspicion about the possibility of botched post-surgical care. 

 

Re Terri Schiavo: I know some conspiracy theorists, my conspiracy theory-loving mother included, who talked about Teri being in a vegetative state due to an attempt on her life by her husband. Mark Furman, of OJ glove infamy, got on the bandwagon by releasing a book before an autopsy was done. 

[LaLele]

5 hours ago, legalbeagle said:

I think it's really easy to dismiss the tragedy of this case and to focus instead on the behavior of Jahi's mother and her insistence on keeping Jahi on life support for so many years. That changes the narrative from one of a young girl who died post-surgery into one where a "crazy" mother refuses to accept that her daughter is dead.

Pre-surgery photos of Jahi show a lovely girl with a pretty smile. I am certain she was well loved by her family. I cannot imagine what her family went through while watching her cough up blood, hemorrhage, go into cardiac arrest, and die. 

I hope Jahi can rest in peace. I hope her family can find some peace, too. I know that if my child died, I would never truly get over it and move on; a piece of me would always be missing. But to the extent possible, I hope they can lay her to rest and someday find joy in life again.

I imagine part of the fight from the family may be tied to their guilt of feeding her the cheeseburger after surgery that was against medical orders.   The guilt they feel has to be tremendous, but if they pretend she's not dead... 

I honestly feel for the mother and siblings, and wouldn't even begrudge them a decent settlement if there was any hospital error or if the hospital wanted to avoid a suit.  Hospitals function via people and people aren't perfect.  Who knows if there was a big or small error that contributed to Jahi's death.  We can't see the records so we can't say.  But it does seem as though the mother has gone at this situation with an eye less towards dignity for her daughter and more towards her own self gain and that might be what doesn't sit well with a lot of people.  

[Jug Band Baby]

@seattlechic, the doctors might not have had a choice.  They're in a state where they have to treat a dead body as alive as long as it's on machines.  I doubt very much that it was easy for them.  They get assigned patients, just like nurses, and have to try to get through it.

@Zenyatta, doctors have to get consent of families before harvesting organs.  There's no point in declaring a person dead for organs if there has been no prior consent.  Beyond just that, Jahi didn't have just a standard tonsil-remover.  Due to her weight, she was having trouble breathing.  Rather than weight loss (since it's a no-no to even suggest that anymore since it's considered fatphobic), her nasal passages and such had to be reconstructed.  In the best of scenarios, it's very risky. 

Reportedly, her family gave her something to eat after the surgery, when they weren't supposed to, which caused her to start to bleed.  A while later, her family changed it all up, and started claiming she started bleeding right away, and no one would go help even when called for help, which is absolutely not believable.  Under no circumstance would every nurse and every doctor ignore a bleeding patient.  At times I've wondered if there's some part of Naihla that feels responsible for Jahi's death because of that popcicle or cheeseburger (everything about food being given to her list those two things consistently as to what was offered to her), and by having her declared alive, she would feel absolved of blame.  But regardless, Jahi's body has shown additional signs of breaking down over the years, and doctor after doctor, who clearly has NOTHING to gain, who have been allowed to actually see her have confirmed death, aside from the quacks who don't believe brain death is a real thing.  

When the public is having to provide the money for a dead person to be kept on machines, that SHOULD be a problem.  There are LIVING people who can't access care, areas where there isn't enough funding.  Diverting funds, equipment, and medical providers to the maintenance of the body of a dead person is very concerning when there are living people, including children, who can't get care because of a lack of funds, equipment, and medical providers.

[Jug Band Baby]

55 minutes ago, LaLele said:

I imagine part of the fight from the family may be tied to their guilt of feeding her the cheeseburger after surgery that was against medical orders.   The guilt they feel has to be tremendous, but if they pretend she's not dead... 

I honestly feel for the mother and siblings, and wouldn't even begrudge them a decent settlement if there was any hospital error or if the hospital wanted to avoid a suit.  Hospitals function via people and people aren't perfect.  Who knows if there was a big or small error that contributed to Jahi's death.  We can't see the records so we can't say.  But it does seem as though the mother has gone at this situation with an eye less towards dignity for her daughter and more towards her own self gain and that might be what doesn't sit well with a lot of people.  

The thought of feeding someone who just had throat surgery makes me rage.  It shouldn't take a doctor's order to know not to feed someone with new sutures.

If there was genuine fault on the part of the hospital (based on everything that's been released, I think the fault does lie with the family, and that it took them months to contradict their own story about feeding her leads me to believe that their new story about her gushing blood and being ignored is a lie, that combined with the sheer improbability if every nurse, doctor, and aid ignoring a bleeding patient), I'd favor a huge settlement.  There are human errors, yes, but when those errors cause someone their life, then it's more than mere error.

Her mother could have released more medical records.  In this case, when she's talked to the world about her daughter's periods (how many teens want the world to know about their periods?), but concealed pertinent records, I'm inclined to believe that that is because there's damning evidence against the family.  No, it can't be claimed that she wanted Jahi to have privacy considering all that she did share.

I don't think anyone in the family meant harm in feeding her, and I would imagine there's tremendous guilt, but the best thing for Jahi, after she died, would have been to give her dignity by not putting her through a charade, and then maybe try to raise awareness of this surgery's risks and the importance of listening to doctors' orders.  Naihla using this for self-gain is a red flag many people aren't willing to ignore.

[legalbeagle]

4 hours ago, Jug Band Baby said:

It's BECAUSE of the tragedy that people are so mad at Nailha, as well as her gross misunderstanding of what would likely happen if a judge or jury bend to her just to get her to stop. 

Rather than treat her daughter with dignity, she was determined to treat her daughter's body like a prop to try to get money.  For fact, she had so much in donation money coming in for a while that she was spending it on high-end purses and such for herself rather than saving the money to use for the reason people gave it--to pay for her daughter's post-mortem care.

And if a judge and jury cave just to make her go away, then we will see countless dead people kept on "life support" until their organs finally are so wasted away that the only alternative is a transplant, and it's fucking scary to think about how declaring dead people to be alive could potentially mean they have to be allowed to line up for organs when there's already a shortage.  Treating corpses as if alive will drain the system faster than just about anything, and living people are going to be more likely to die because of having to compete with corpses. 

So changing the death certificate date, which sounds like a simple thing to do just to make a mother feel better, actually has extremely huge consequences.  (Also, CHO would likely have to pay her the cost of all of Jahi's "health care" for the past 4.5 years, even though she herself didn't pay for it--donors did.  So she'd pocket a windfall.)

I hear you. I do not at all condone the behavior of her mom, and I agree there is a rightful place for the anger that her behavior has caused. I just wanted to restore a bit of dignity to Jahi. I look at photos of her and feel tremendously sad that her life has been cut short, and I wanted to take a moment to put out there into the internet (and the universe) that I hope Jahi is at peace. 

BTW, a few people here have referenced the family feeding her a cheeseburger. I've read discussion of that elsewhere, but is it a substantiated fact? I honestly don't know what would be worse -- having it be true and the family's actions resulted in her death, or having it be NOT true and the doctors and nurses at the hospital just ignored a post-op patient coughing up a bucket of blood. Either way it's terrible. 

[Rachel333]

I work in a cardiac ICU and a pretty high percentage of patients end up dying there. What I've been struck by is how long it often takes to make the decision to withdraw care even after everyone is in agreement that there's no chance of survival.  They do everything they possibly can to save the patient (to the point where I hear doctors say they feel really guilty about doing it to people instead of letting them pass in peace) and have all sorts of talks with the family to make sure they fully understand the situation and agree with the plan to withdraw care.  Once they've made that decision they decide with the family when they're going to do it; some families don't want to draw it out, and with others it might take a couple days if people need to travel there to say goodbye. It's around that point--once the decision is already made--that, if the family agrees, they contact the team that coordinates organ donation.

I've definitely heard people talk about organ donation like doctors let people die because they want to harvest organs as soon as possible, but that is so far from what I've seen.

[persuas1ve]

31 minutes ago, legalbeagle said:

 

BTW, a few people here have referenced the family feeding her a cheeseburger. I've read discussion of that elsewhere, but is it a substantiated fact? I honestly don't know what would be worse -- having it be true and the family's actions resulted in her death, or having it be NOT true and the doctors and nurses at the hospital just ignored a post-op patient coughing up a bucket of blood. Either way it's terrible. 

I’ve heard this story too but never seen actual proof cited—interview, article, etc.

[Jug Band Baby]

11 minutes ago, persuas1ve said:

I’ve heard this story too but never seen actual proof cited—interview, article, etc.

Some of the early court filings by Chris Dolan were posted online.  That's where the popsicle came from, with the claim that Jahi asked for it.  I personally read two filings that brought it up.  Then in an article a year or two later, where Nailha (I never remember the spelling of her name) was interviewed but not nurses (who can't talk because of HIPAA), the story became nurses offered her a popsicle.

The grandmother mentioned a cheeseburger at some point, which is when some people started wondering if the popsicle was really a cheeseburger and they said popsicle since it sounds better.

But, for fact, at least two early filings by Dolan did mention the popsicle.  I think a lot of things have been removed, or else pushed back farther in search results than I'm going to go (my limit is usually the first page), but here is one article that mentions her asking, and the source is a court filing by Dolan.  https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2013/12/30/document-appeal-describes-jahi-mcmaths-post-surgical-bleeding-before-heart-attack-brain-death/

I wish I hadn't closed a link I was reading on my phone this morning that included something that was a red flag.  A not-so-nutty doctor said she could have crossed back into "intermittent minimally conscious" (though did say that she wouldn't ever recover more than that), but the red flag is that that was based on videos provided by Jahi's mother, and that the brain didn't deteriorate as fast as that doctor would have expected. 

The article also went into how, as medical science advances, activity in the brain that has never been detectable before could be detected soon, which is going to bring up a huge issue of how to diagnose brain death then, when the only activity that might be detectable is less than be detected now, which is already a point beyond which no one has ever returned.  And yes, this is going to bring up medical costs.  If these advances could make it so that everybody has to be kept on machines until their hearts or other organs can't be sustained any longer, the massive costs of this could realistically be more than taxpayers or insurance companies can possibly cover (and I think we can all agree that taxing us all at 90% to cover this isn't reasonable), in which case decisions will have to be made about who will get medical care when so much of the resources are going to people in hospitals who are braindead, on machines, and can't be stabilized enough to be discharged, and which people with a chance at life will have to be turned away, and then possibly die when they wouldn't have otherwise.

Let's say medical science were to advance tomorrow to the point that one neuron could be detected as firing every few hours, but that the person is otherwise having no activity and would be considered braindead today.  If it were tomorrow, and there was still no hope for any real recovery, should a family be allowed to demand that their loved one be kept in a hospital's bed, using their equipment and medical staff, indefinitely?  And if so, should there be some sort of limit on what percentage of a hospital's beds could be used for that to prevent a situation where a hospital may end up almost full of these patients so that there are maybe only a few or no beds for living patients?

[melon]

I am glad Jahi is finally at peace.I have some sympathy for her mother,some empathy,too.I,too,have lost a child.

At first,I was in denial,I didn't want to accept what they told me,that my son would never be the same,require 24/7 care,and that I should consider the quality of his life.I had to have a few days to come to this realization and acceptance.It was hard to see my youngest child in this state,but because of the injuries he sustained,being ejected from a vehicle, he was gone.

I had to think about what he would have wanted.But I cannot understand why she would let her child remain in limbo,or a vegetative state,for nearly 5 years.

I still remember how I felt.Hopeless,depressed,physically and mentally exhausted.The hospital staff was so kind and supportive.The day we removed him from his vent,one of his nurses came and hugged me and said she would have done the same thing.SInce he was an organ donor,they had to prep him for surgery that came after he was pronounced dead,but they let me stay with him until he passed..I did not want him to die ,alone.

Mr Melon carries a lot of guilt.He was driving,they both did not have their seat belts on.Mr Melon was thrown behind the driver's seat,breaking his arm and he had a concussion.He worried that he was somehow at fault,or had an insulin reaction.The other driver that clipped them was at fault.We could have sued,but Mr Melon did not want to.