Word: comas
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Grace and Dignity. Karen's adoptive parents, Joseph and Julia Ann Quinlan, will appear in court this week in Morris County, N.J., to argue that the 21-year-old girl, who has been in a coma since April, should be allowed to die "with grace and dignity." Both Roman Catholics, they have the support of their priest but not of their doctors or the state authorities. "We sympathize with the Quinlans," says New Jersey Attorney General William Hyland. "We do not wish to add to their anguish." But he insists that state law does not permit a termination...
...that he would "never be anything but a shell," she told doctors to let him die. Sometimes, as in the Quinlan case, the parents find the doctor unwilling, either for ethical reasons or fear of a malpractice suit. In Elyria, Ohio, for example, Randal Carmen, 17, lapsed into a coma after a football injury and doctors refused to give up on him until he died two weeks later. Some patients are luckier. "I have seen people in comas who have survived after many days on machines," says Tennessee Plastic Surgeon McCarthy DeMere...
...night last April, Karen Ann Quinlan, 21, went to bed saying she was not feeling well. She never woke up. Stricken with a still undiagnosed malady (perhaps the result of mistakenly mixing a tranquilizer and drinks), she has remained in a coma ever since. One side of her permanently damaged brain shows almost no sign of functioning while the other gives off only slight but steady signals visible on an electroencephalogram. Last week, unwittingly, Karen Ann became the focus of the continuing legal-medical-ethical controversy over how to define death...
...reversed for those who contract another form of the disease called Western Equine Encephalitis (WEE)−a variation that is largely confined to horses but can also hit humans. Adults usually recover from a WEE infection, but in infants and children, it can produce high fever, convulsions and coma; those under one year of age who survive an infection are likely to have permanent brain damage. So far this year WEE has struck hundreds of horses and killed six of its 9 human victims in the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota...
Heat stroke, which often occurs when the body produces more heat than it radiates away, can produce kidney failure, coma and death. It has killed some 50 high school and college football players during the past decade, and will strike down dozens of others in the next few weeks as coaches start preseason drills to get their teams into shape. The irony, says Dr. James P. Knochel, a kidney-disease expert from the Veterans Administration Hospital in Dallas, is that these incidents are unnecessary. Heat stroke, he writes in the A.M.A. Journal, can be prevented if coaches and trainers...