As the school bus rolled to a stop outside her Lake County home, Beth Jones adjusted the bright yellow document protruding from the pouch of her daughter's wheelchair, making sure it was clearly visible. Posted on 12/10/2007 10:11:05 AM PST by Sopater
As the school bus rolled to a stop outside her Lake County home, Beth Jones adjusted the bright yellow document protruding from the pouch of her daughter's wheelchair, making sure it was clearly visible.
In bold letters it warned, "Do Not Resuscitate."
The DNR order goes everywhere with Katie, including her 2nd-grade classroom at Laremont School in Gages Lake. The school is part of the Special Education District of Lake County, where an emotional two-year discussion ended this summer when officials agreed to honor such directives.
Now, district officials find themselves in the unusual position of having planned the steps its staff will, or won't, take to permit a child to die on school grounds. Although DNR orders are common in hospitals and nursing homes, such life-and-death drama rarely plays out in schools, where officials realize how sensitive and traumatic the situation could be for nurses, teachers and students.
Katie's brain was deprived of oxygen before birth. She can't walk, talk or do anything for herself. She is fed through a tube in her stomach and has an increased susceptibility to infection. Violent choking and coughing spasms have signaled a turn for the worse in her condition.
A Do Not Resuscitate order is a doctor's directive, issued with the consent of the family, that cardiopulmonary resuscitation will not be used if the patient suffers from heart or breathing problems. It can also prohibit using such devices as a defibrillator or an intubation tube. 
The new DNR policy puts Katie's school district at the forefront of a growing national debate about severely disabled and chronically ill children whose lives have been extended by medical advances -- and whose parents must face heart-wrenching decisions about the future.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
I guess we can see, when you cannot, that when the parents send her away for many hours each day, that others don’t want to see her die, suffocate slowly. It would be horrible and traumatic on the caregivers.
Again, I am talking about my personal duty to obey the dictates of my conscience.
I am not making decisions for the parents: if they want to watch their daughter die without helping her, that is their decision and they will have to live with it.
But they do not have the right to compel me to behave exactly as they do.
Far be it for me to ever argue with an emotional woman intent on yelling. Nuff said.
You are willfully ignoring the point. This is a child who is dying, painfully. You are freakishly obsessed with continuing her suffering, despite the wishes of her parents and her doctors.
And once again, YOU ARE NOT SAVING HER LIFE. She will not spring back with a full recovery.
The sense of self-fulfillment you get out of being the hero not trump the rights of her parents or the common decency to let her die naturally.
But Hillary appreciates the sentiment, using a sense of moral outrage to take decisions away from parents.
I’m sorry I don’t get the
Yeah. I had a cousin is somewhat better shape who lasted into her 30’s.
If a child went into a nursing home for long term care, who would pay that bill?
Was the last person who resuscitated her doing the work of the Devil?
Perhaps you can tell someone that it is God's will that he stand aside and watch a child die. But in his view, he may believe it to be God's will that he do something to help her in her hour of need.
Can you really pronounce him to be disobeying God's will?
I do understand your point of forcing these teachers to violate their conscience, but it doesn’t really apply.
The clear implication of circulating this legal document and displaying it so prominently is clear: If you do not collude with me in allowing my child to die, I will sue you.
Sad.
The first appropriate, non-knee jerk response on this thread. Thanks for posting! I agree completely.
Granted, I am not a young child but if I have a DNR order, I fully expect it to be followed and respected. To me, it does not come down to morality or anything else along those lines. It comes down to freedom and the choice I can make.
Nowhere in the article does it say the school is for the severly to profoundly disabled. It says it’s part of a special education district.
Regardless, a school is not a place children should be dying.
Being used to caring for or teaching sick kids does not equate to children dying in class as going with the territory.
Thank you for your informative post. God bless you, your daughter, and your family.
Not that it matters one way or another, but, I don’t disagree with your decisions under your particular circumstances.
Of course, no two cases are exactly the same, and, this article unfortunately doesn’t provide enough information for anything much more than conjecture. It raises more questions than it answers.
Look at the picture at the top - there are other kids in wheelchairs and it is a “special school” I can guarantee you it is a school that works with severe and profound, perhaps in addition to other severe disabilities
How can they ‘help’ her?
CPR and maybe a vent and that’s about it....
A vent isn’t pleasant and it gets clogged, a lot.
Plus once she’s on it, the odds are she won’t come off of it.....so she’s stuck on a machine that keeps her alive.
Then there’s a tube feeding, IV’s etc.
Geez, enough machines she can be kept alive a long time.
However, she won’t be living.
Yes, I agree. The purpose of school is to get kids to the point of self-sufficiency and prepare for adulthood. They do that by providing education. This seems more a case of baby-sitting, all at the taxpayer's expense. I take care of a child who is neurologically devastated. Every year, he takes a test mandated by the state, and a result of No Child Left Behind. One test consists of him identifying colors. Since he is "taught" in the home, and he can't take a written test, the teacher brings a video camera, sets up various colored objects, tells him to "put his hand on the orange ball", takes his hand and places it over the orange ball, and thus, he "passes".
This child is almost 14 years old, a victim of his father (shaken baby syndrome), and wasn't supposed to have lived past 1 year of age. Due to excellent care, he has lived much longer, but has deteriorating brain matter, and could go at any time. He is a DNR as well (in my opinion, this is appropriate).
No. I think God is killing this child.
See post 183.
So the moral calculus of saving someone's life is based on whether the resuscitation will "take"? Interesting standard.
The sense of self-fulfillment you get out of being the hero not trump the rights of her parents or the common decency to let her die naturally. But Hillary appreciates the sentiment, using a sense of moral outrage to take decisions away from parents.
If you really enjoy repeating this silly rhetoric over and over, be my guest. But don't imagine that it lends any strength to your arguments.
Also, it really is a matter of your opinion that she sees her continued existence as suffering. Even her parents admit that she experiences happy or joyful emotions when she is at school - so your opinion doesn't seem to be exactly definitive.
Rather than have you, VC, as the ultimate arbiter of who does or who does not have the quality of life morally necessary for survival, I would prefer to have human beings remain free moral agents answerable to their consciences and their Creator.
That child should be able to die at home with her family around her not while being wheeled down the hall to a nurse’s office, or in a classroom or anywhere else where her parents may not be.
If her mother was willing to go to school with her that would be fine as well but to send the child off not knowing if you’ll ever see her alive again is not acceptable.
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