Daughter saves mother, 80, left by doctors to starve

[Craftsman]

AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.

Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.

Fenton’s daughter, Christine Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital in Hastings, East Sussex, on January 11, says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6869646.ece

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

1. Ahhhhhh, posting about a UK death panel?

:eyes:

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. From Murdoch's Times, no less.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

3. I'm sure if it was up to Murdoch, she'd be left to die in the streets.

[Craftsman]

6. If you can't defend the occurance attack the source.

I gather my info from all sources possible.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

15. Murdoch has an agenda

which includes making the British NHS and U.S. health care reform look bad. If you want to consider all sources, it would be good to find another source for this story as well. It would be more credible coming from something other than a Murdoch publication.

[Craftsman]

19. Don't we all

[timeforpeace]

20. Careful reading reveals that the heroine daughter was taking care of mum when they found her so ill.

A little CYA going on here.

[baldguy]

35. "Consider the source."

The source's agenda is a vital piece of information when determining it's validity.

[Craftsman]

4. Do you dispute this event or just don't like to hear about it?

[SidDithers]

13. I dispute the event...

in that we don't know all of the details, and what we do know, we're learning from a source with an obvious agenda.

Sid

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

23. I don't trust the source.

[MoonRiver]

5. It's called hospice.

Happens here too, ALL THE TIME. I personally know of five terminal people who were helped in their final days by hospice.

[vadawg]

7. yeah but ut seems that shes still alive months after they took away the feeding

looks more like either a monumental feck up or just hastening her demise...

[SidDithers]

10. She was without her feeding tube for a period of weeks...

She's been back on it for many months.

Sid

Edit: don't know if she's still on it, but it artificial feeding was restarted on Jan 23.

[vadawg]

11. lol i knew that, i guess my otherpost didnt make it clear

though it would be amazing to still be kicking after all that time....

[SidDithers]

12. Sorry to jump in where it wasn't needed...

:hi:

Sid

[Craftsman]

8. Easing pain and helping to pass is different from no feeding or water

This is evil.

[MoonRiver]

32. That's what hospice does!

People are given massive doses of pain medication so they don't suffer.

[Hannah Bell]

27. you *choose* hospice, you're not *assigned" to it.

decision to remove feeding has to involve patient a/or family.

[OneGrassRoot]

9. It really would be nice to rely on posted news as being factual...

Nowadays it's so hard to believe anything unless we experience it first hand.

It being printed in a Murdoch paper certainly makes many of us here less likely to believe that all the facts were presented. He most definitely has an agenda.

That said, there may very well be some truth to it, and I really wish we could know the truth. The right-wingers will use these stories to the hilt to continue to scare our senior citizens here and we always need to be aware of facts and not dismiss all negative stories -- as they have done to us for eight years -- as hogwash.

Comments at online news sites are always so slanted (and often paid for) that we can't rely on them for insight either.

It does appear that, if nothing else, this story elucidates the need for discussion PRIOR to illness and incapacity about one's desires for treatment, life-saving efforts, etc.

[bertman]

17. Thank you for a lucid and sensible response, OneGrassRoot.

[Duke Newcombe]

14. Cigna will be sending you your per diem shortly... n/t

[Doremus]

16. Oh fer petesakes. If I want to see rightwing trash I'll go to the rightwing trash dump.

Take your hyperbolic spew to other places where reading about fictional accounts of death panels give them woodies.

NOT DU.

[Craftsman]

22. What proof do you have this did not happen?

[Doremus]

24. Kindly look up the term "Anecdotal evidence"

Then haul thy ass over to some other website where the posters
would cream their pants reading your little story.

Rightwing bile has no place here.

Scat.


On edit:

By the way, you can't prove a negative, so you might want to stop telling people to prove the story didn't happen. It only reveals your own ignorance.

[bertman]

18. Thanks for posting this, Craftsman. Despite the foul rhetoric from the haters, we need to

hear from multiple sources whether they bolster our arguments or not. To me, this only represents one incident and should be taken as such--not a pattern.

I have a sister-in-law whose father is in England and has been under state medical care for a few years. Her experiences regarding his care have been less than stellar. He's in his mid-80's and experiencing dementia.

Yesterday I was talking with a man who spends lots of time in Europe, particularly France. We were discussing their healthcare system and got around to how they provide care for the terminally ill at the end of their lives. His comment was that unlike here in America, where we expect to have chemo, radiation, and any other therapies available to those in their golden years who contract cancer, in France they treat cancer differently. He says that they do not offer all of the heroic end-of-life measures because they view life and death differently. So, rather than spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on keeping a 70 year-old alive, that person accepts that the end of a good life is near and is treated with painkillers so the end is not horrific. Interesting approach. Sounds very reasonable and natural to me, but I know a lot of folks will disagree.

[Craftsman]

21. That maybe true, but the majority of MAericans will not quietly accept death

They will demand every effort be made.

[havocmom]

25. And tens of thousands die annually in the US for lack of ability to afford health care

Hmmm, I like the odds better where there is state sponsored care.

[alittlelark]

26. There are no quotes from Hazel Fenton.

If this is an issue she should say so.

My maternal grandmother begged my mother not to call an ambulance (1982). She was 80 and had been bedridden for 4 years - the ambulance came, she spent the next 2 years bedridden and died in a hospital covered in tubes.

My paternal grandmother was mentally sharp as a tack, but her eyesight was going. She Loved to read (she was a Librarian). She didn't want to live anymore. When the time came the family waited to call an ambulance. When they got there she was almost gone and spent 2-3 hours 'alive' at the hospital. She died at 92 on 9-7-01 (I add that date because that's why I was flying on 9-11-01).

If this is an issue HAZEL should have some words to say about it.

[winyanstaz]

28. my husband was sent home to die..and we were told he had less than five months at the most..to live.

One of the doctors stood over him and asked me why I was bothering to try and get him care.."He is just going to die anyways."
I took him home...stopped all the pills they were giving him (about 7-8 different kinds..I dont remember what all...except for his blood thinning medicine for his last heart attack...and we went all natural.
He went up from 97 lbs (when they sent him home to die..a man of 6 foot tall) to 179 lbs..and he lived another nine years.
Long enough to meet two new little granddaughtors...long enough for many more holidays and family gatherings. Long enough to learn to play the flute and write me a love song.
He was a wonderful man..and I shall remember him with love always...however..that is not the point.
The point of my sharing this is simply this.
Don't believe the Doctors..they are not Gods and they are NOT always right.

[tkmorris]

29. And yet, somehow their life expectancy is greater than ours

If allowing older people to die rather than treat them was widespread, that would obviously not be the case now would it?

[Oilwellian]

30. Oh, ouchie tkmorris

I love it when facts enter the discussion. :D

[Arugula Latte]

31. Why don't you post about how 1,000s die here annually 'cuz they can't afford medical care?

The truth about the US system doesn't serve your agenda, huh?

[Spike89]

33. Another screw up story? Jeebus help us

On its face, it's a sad and disturbing story, but it is far from a full story too. Being charitable though, even if there is no "other side" and no details that might cast it quite differently--the question is so what? Not to be cruel, but millions and millions of people live in England and we hear a story of one person that may have gotten bad care? There is nothing harder for many people than the care of their dying parents, especially the gut-wrenching decisions that they must make. There are going to be dissatisfied "customers" of healthcare in these situations. There is nothing newsworthy about this story.

I'm sick of the sleazy tactics and scaremongering inherent in the slanted anecdotal stories being thrown up here. Show some real statistics, even give me poll results from England, but slandering the system with nothing but semi-verified horror stories and outlier examples does nothing.

[Barack_America]

34. In those 9 months 33,750 Americans died for lack of health insurance. nt