Charlotte's condition 'serious'

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Charlotte's condition 'serious'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hamp ... 752294.stm

For those of you who know very little or nothing about this, Charlotte Wyatt was born 3 months premature with severe brain, kidney and lung damage and is in constant pain as result. Her parents, Darren and Debbie Wyatt have been fighting for her right to live pretty much since she was born and how she should be kept alive. However, the courts have ruled that doctors should let her die as she is seriously ill.

What are your views on this? This may sound cruel but a part of me says she should have been allowed to die long before this as she doesn't really have much quality of life as she lives in constant pain and I think its unfair to put anyone through this kind of suffering. I think the ruling, although it is very sad, is fair as it will alleviate this child's suffering. I hope that this view doesn't offend anyone and if does Im sorry. I can understand why her parents are fighting for her, its all out of love and no parent wants their child to die, especially as Charlotte is only a toddler. At one point it was thought that she was making progress but now she is extremely ill and has a viral chest infection on top of her already defective lungs. I brought this up as it does, for me, provoke some emotion as I really feel for the child and can't imagine what she must be feeling, or her parents.

Its medical science defying natures will im afraid. These situations are always tragic. Same with my mothers work colleague who resussitated her 9 month old daughter who had technically "died" of cot death. She survived but she is now for the most part near brain dead due to the time she was deprived of oxygen till her mother found her and will probably be around for a few more years. Also I have been working on nurse placements with other children who had similair tragic experiances like this and survived. I would say the key thing that enables these children to live sometimes into adulthood and beyond is medical interventions such as drugs and the PEG and nasal gastric feeding tubes, overnight feed pumps etc

But then legally speaking this is the kind of issue that people have fought long and hard against simply to prevent the Eugenics movement gaining the power and influence it once had in politics. This is a small price to pay in some respects to letting the sociological-gene nazi's loose on our political landscape.

How horrifying it must be for Charlotte's parents to have to justify her life to a judge. I can't even imagine the pain they are going through.

It bothers me very much when people decide that a certain kind of life is more worth saving than another. I wonder whether the situation has more to do with the amount of money Charlotte's medical care costs in a country with socialized medicine rather than the amount of pain her doctors believe she feels. She does not look like she is a baby in constant pain to me. Some able-bodied people think that life isn’t worth living without physical perfection and that those who have disabilities don’t have lives worth living. Disabled people have just as much right to live as able-bodied people, in my opinion.

Here is Charlotte's Wyatt's blog.

http://charlottewyatt.blogspot.com/

I have to agree with Laz here.

It is defying nature's will

If we did not defy "nature's will", our average life expectancy would be much lower than it is right now. People with relatively simple problems would die from them, just like they did 200 or even 100 years ago. Medical science is amazing to me. My daughter was born with several medical problems and without modern medical science she would be dead.

She was born with a large hole in her heart between her ventricles and she needed a nasogastric tube for feeding as well as heart medication. She had open heart surgery to repair the hole when she was three weeks old and had to be placed on ExtraCorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO), a sort of heart-lung machine, for about a week following the surgery. This makes a ventilator look like nothing in comparison. She has renal reflux and takes antibiotics to prevent a kidney infection and she may need surgery to repair the reflux if she does not outgrow it. She also has congenital scoliosis which may need surgery as well, but she is pretty much fine today. She has autism and some people would consider this a disability, but I am very grateful for her life, even if her life is not perfect by other people's standards.

Just so you all know, I would like to clarify that I also feel that disabled people have just as much right to live as able bodied people. What gets me is people living in pain unnecessarily and having to die like that, I think its unfair.

Anyway, the primary reason I came back to this thread was to put on a link to another article concerning Charlotte (if you haven't already read it) which is more positive I'm happy to say. And thanks for link to Charlotte's blog Aspen, I found it to be very thought provoking.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hamp ... 762222.stm