You know I work as an RN and sometimes sucky things happen to patients despite all protocols being followed. Someone reacts to medications in unexpected ways, an artery gets cut or a suture doesn’t hold cause the patient’s tissue was too friable and gives way. A clot gets loose....ect. Tonsillectomies are much more problematic when done beyond the age of 7 or 8 because the tissues are more vascular and subject to hemorrhage. The stories i’m hearing about the post op care and observations concern me since it looks as though the patient may have needed an emergency trache and surgery/cauterization/packing to control the bleeding. Instead...it appears the patient may have aspirated and choked on the clotted blood. That should have never even got that far!
Be that as it may,
it would be interesting to test the responses of certain key administrators by announcing “Take her off life support but no organ donations, I couldn’t bear to know that my child is dead while somebody else’s kid gets to live!”
Very interesting. I had my tonsils removed when I was 30 because of repeated infections. It was done in a doctor's office and I was awake during the entire procedure; the doctor gave me a drug that was unlike anything I had had before or ever since. It made me fearless. Even the scapel going into my mouth (which was locked open by some device) elicited no concern.
Based on what you write, I was in more danger than I thought at the time.
Anytime you go in for surgery you sign a large number of disclaimers stating the possible risks.
The general assumption on this thread is that the surgeon MUST have screwed up or the child would not have died. That’s not the way risk works.
If you perform a large number of any surgery, some small percentage of those will result in severe complications or even death.
Them’s the facts. To my mind it is liberals who refuse to accept tradeoffs, that small risks of severe consequences must be faced and balanced against the much more likely good results. Which means of course that some people will lose this bet.
Liberals refuse to accept this fact, and insist that any negative outcome must be the result of human error or malevolence. In fact, I think the refusal to accept this is the defining characteristic of liberalism.