One good thing. Wait, though, no, it’s not really a good thing – it’s just the avoidance of a bad thing. I keep noticing how often a bit of good news I’m pointing out is actually just a bit of bad news reversed or prevented or stepped around. More actual good news that isn’t just the negation of previous bad news would be nice.
An appeals court has sided with a hospital that wants to force a 10-year-old Amish girl to resume chemotherapy after her parents decided to stop the treatments.
Yeh that’s a pretty minimal, routine thing to greet as good news. Girl with leukemia continues chemotherapy; wow.
The hospital believes Sarah’s leukemia is very treatable but says she will die without chemotherapy.
The judge in Medina County in northeast Ohio had ruled in July that Sarah’s parents had the right to make medical decisions for her.
If refusing medical treatment for a fatal disease can be called a “medical” decision at all.
Andy Hershberger, the girl’s father, said the family agreed to begin two years of treatments for Sarah last spring but stopped a second round of chemotherapy in June because it was making her extremely sick.
“It put her down for two days. She was not like her normal self,” he said. “We just thought we cannot do this to her.”
Sarah begged her parents to stop the chemotherapy and they agreed after a great deal of prayer, Hershberger said. The family, members of an insular Amish community, shuns many facets of modern life and is deeply religious.
So that could be part of the problem. Perhaps they don’t trust “modern” medical science enough to trust the doctors when they explain that the chemo will make her much sicker in the short term but has an 85% chance of success in curing her in the longer term.
It’s a sad story. Obviously watching a treatment make your child much sicker must be horrible, and the temptation to avoid the short-term misery must be overwhelming. But the Amish don’t equip themselves well to overcome that temptation.