lolgaxe wrote:
She's in Texas, how are they certain she really is brain dead?
Hah. Funny, but also relevant to a conversation a co-worker and I had last week (or maybe two weeks ago? I forget). He was telling me about this case (which I hadn't actually heard about yet) and I was telling him about the girl who ended out brain dead as a result of a botched appendectomy. He had a very different perspective on both cases due to something that happened to him when he was a child. His brother was in an accident and was declared brain dead by the doctors at the time. His mom refused to believe them, even when they insisted they could detect no neural activity in his brain stem and no response from any stimulus. She fought against their attempts to remove him from life support. Then after 3 months, he woke up. He's still alive today, with no brain damage, and otherwise fully functional.
Now, this was 1970s era medicine, which presumably isn't quite as good at determining brain activity than we can today, but the point is that doctors are occasionally just plain wrong. Do I think that means that every grieving parent should keep their otherwise dead child on life support for months until the body rots away? No. But I understand that every once in a while the odds don't play out the way we assume they will.