Listen up, Sparky: I HAVE. And so have a number of other people on this thread. And ya know what? This is ********. This is politically-driven, ideologically charged ********, enforced by a group of self-appointed moral watchmen (and it is men, you know, behind it all...just one more episode of Let's All Praise Men's Control Of Women's Bodies, and yes, I am aware of the fact that this damns all, "sides" here) who don't want anything to do with actually wiping asses and trying to unkink twisted limbs.
Lemme tell ya about a child I met when I worked at a Children's Hospital--let's just say in the Midwest, around, oh, 1980. We'll call him....Butch.
Well, Butch was born to an underage, junkie mom, about, oh, three months pre-term, about three months before I started checking ventilators in the NICU (newborn intensive care unit...a level IV nursery for the several-state area; they flew kids in) RDS (respiratory distress syndrome...no surfactant in the alveoli); several Grade III-IV brain bleeds (scale starts at I, goes to IV), soon had RLF (retro-lental fibroplasia....retinas die since over-oxygenated, but if you don't oxygenate...), repeated horrible convulsions...I seem to recall resuscitating this "kid," twice a shift.
Hey, we saved him. Oh good. Ed Meese's new guidelines had kicked in (ironic what happened to his boss...no, better not go there, and that year we had at leat two anencephalic newborns (born without real brains, kids) kept on BabyBirds because the Feds insisted.
After the first year, the parents stopped coming to visit their blind, deaf, profoundly brain-damaged, convulsing, tracheotomized, parenterally-fed offspring--got divorced, their "family" collapsed. They were poor, and couldn't deal. They stuck him in a side room of the NICU...we kept treating him, the whole year I was there. For me, that meant IPPB q2, postural draininge, suction.
Which is where he remained. Eventually, he got off the ventilator...I started college, came back to work next summer...he was on CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) and permanenently tracheotomized--and endless meds---blind, deaf, dumb, no purposeful movement to speak of, no social interaction except what he got from people like me and the great nurses who'd try and cuddle him when they weren't too busy. No walking, no play, no nothing.
I came back the next summer to work a couple shifts--needed the money. "Hey, what happened to...." Well, kids, he died. Thank God, and us agnostics don't say that lightly.
So tell us, O self-appointed Guardians of America's Morality--that sound good to you? That sound like anything Jesus had in mind? How 'bout Jefferson--he'd have said, well, now, here's the sort of thing that makes me proud?
Hey, go volunteer for a year. Hospitals, rehab centers, hospices always need people. Then get back to us.
