Since one of Jahi's family members is said to be a registered nurse, I don't exactly know how that person can be in denial about the medical facts.
I have two personal examples to share with you. One involves my father. I am also a nurse, and had worked with and knew his ICU nurses years before. When I arrived at the hospital, my dad was in ICU, not on a ventilator, just with an IV, O2 and of course, heart monitor. He had a massive GI bleed of undetermined origin at home that AM and almost died. He was also a chronic heart and renal failure patient by that point. His age was advanced. He had outlived most of his friends.
The ICU nurses grabbed me as soon as I had seen my father. They showed me his lab values for BUN, Creatinine, and serum potassium. They were incompatible with life, and he was receiving a medication which lowers potassium- nasty stuff.
It was clear to me in less than 1 minute that my father's labs were incompatible with life, or a good quality of life.
I asked them if he was a Code Blue, because most ICUs will not accept DNR patients for good reason. They said " Yes, that's why we wanted to talk to you". I wasn't a bit upset except that my daddy was so sick, I was exceptionally pleased that they understood that I would not want my dad resuscitated in the presence of chronic organ dysfunction/ impending failure.
I talked to my mother that night and she asked the doctor many questions the next AM. They decided upon a DBR status for him, and he was moved to a reg. hospital room. He died peacefully several months later after being at home, alert and happy, for the entire summer. He lived a good life, he had a good death.
Next, I want to share with you something that happened to me as a nurse in Florida. It is true that some parts of Florida are saturated with elderly people. Some are in nursing homes, of course. I worked on a surgical floor, and most of the pre-surgical patients were elderly patients who needed multiple workups before surgery. Then, our hospital got a laser and a new eye surgeon to do the modern cataract removal surgeries in 1983.
I noticed that all of the inpatient cataract patients we had were from nursing homes.. and none of them could talk, roll over, feed themselves- in other words, their quality of life was end stage. They were close to natural deaths. However, this eye surgeon was finding cataracts in these peoples' eyes and removing them surgically and charging Medicare.
To this day, I do not understand how what he die was ethical or justifiable. Not because a dying person with no family shouldn't have the right to see, but because ALL surgeries have risks. And because it seemed that he was using these first " discarded" elderly people as learning experiences.
Ethics is not one thing for one person and another thing for another person when the conditions are the same. It is the practice of applying the same standards according to the criteria.
Long story short, this is ALL about money. Just like the eye surgeries on people too elderly to even understand that they were in a hospital and who had no family to see what was going on profited the hospital and the eye surgeon, every day that this little girl is allowed to stay in a bed instead of a casket in the ground, the more money her family will collect for their own emotional pain and suffering as well as the injuries to the child.
As for the earlier comments about how her surgical wounds might heal and not be obvious to a coroner. big deal. The MEDICAL RECORD tells the story of what happened, what was done when, and the facts of the Code Blue. The Medical Record of this child is the smoking gun. The family knows this because there is a nurse in the immediate family, just as I know it for the same reason.
The insurance company is not getting involved because they have deeper pockets than the surgeon, the hospital, etc. I ran into the same problem when I worked in Utilization Management. No one except at Medicaid would take the responsibility to deny treatment if the denial would result in certain death.
