Yesterday I wrote a blog about a young man with a serious brain injury who is slowly recovering at Palomar Medical Center.
Blue Cross California wanted to terminate his treatment and shunt him off to a nursing home, or send him home.

That diary sank without a trace, buried in a flood of opinion pieces about candidates, and that is sad. I was hoping that enough people would read it to make a noise that would cause Blue Cross to reverse its decision.

Well, so much for the power of the internet. Apparently Hillary and Obama are just so much more of a vital topic that everyone and their brother had to chip in their two cents.

Hardly anyone read it, and that is too bad, because this case pretty much outlines what we have to look forward to if certain pols get elected. Medicine by bureaucrats flying a desk, determining what course to take. I am disgusted, both by the lack of attention Scott Eveland's story got, and the treatment he's getting from Blue Cross California.

Original diary here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...

Yesterday I posted a memorial to my cousin http://www.dailykos.com/... , who recently fell into a coma due to complications resulting from her having survived hodgkins disease http://en.wikipedia.org/... and then contracted streptococcus pneumoniae http://en.wikipedia.org/... , which profoundly damaged her lungs in a matter of hours.

Today I received news that has made the situation that much worse.

One of my great dissapointments with life is that after-school specials aren't that far off the mark from the life one will actually lead.  Friends really will die of drugs, alcohol and bad luck.  Your parents may get divorced and may develop terminal diseases.  And sometimes someone you love goes into a coma.

A Case:

A man in his 40's came to the hospital for weakness on one half of his body. In the ER, he vomited several times and fell to the ground unconscious. He never woke up. A CT scan showed an enormous stroke that had swelled, compressing the other half of his brain against the skull and squeezing his brainstem, the site of his most basic respiratory function, to the point of uselessness. His physical exam indicated not just coma, but flat-out brain death. There were several tasks left to do-

1. Confirm it with an "apnea test"- measuring the CO2 content of the arterial blood and waiting until it reached a high enough level that it would induce a breath in any living human. No breath= no life.
   
2. Contact his family
   
3. Contact the organ donation network

I performed the apnea test, the first I had ever done. I punctured the artery in his wrist and sent multiple samples of blood to the lab. He didn't breathe, as expected. Diagnosis made, death pronounced. This is where things got difficult.