Those Who were Thought Dead might be Alive
By Kevin Roeten (03/23/08)
We find people who many thought were dead, are now healthy. Do we dare make that judgment on who lives and who dies? In the Declaration, “life” is listed as a right--and is listed first. But some have revised the Declaration to form a different definition of “life”. Nobody told them that the Declaration couldn’t be changed, but many hospitals and authorities believe it can.
Sometimes people are told they will never recover from a serious injury, and their life is no longer worth living. They’re in pain, and being in a ‘comatose’ or ‘permanent vegetative state’ is likely something that is unrecoverable. Some believe it is wise to remove their feeding tube. Have you ever noticed that patients are only told this when they can’t respond? And their closest relatives are complicit with the urge to put them “down”?
Just a few of the recent happenings recorded:
1) 6/4/07; White (LifeSiteNews); Dzialdowo, Poland; Jan Grzewski was a Polish railway worker who was hospitalized after an injury at work and remained in a coma; doctors found cancer in his brain and predicted he would not recover; after 19 years he spontaneously woke up and talked about memories of when he was in a coma
2) 9/17/07; Reuters; Venezuela, SA; Carlos Camejo was declared dead after a highway accident, and was sent to a morgue; he woke up in excruciating pain while medical examiners started their autopsy; examiners determined something was amiss when the body started bleeding
3) 10/19/07; Dubek/12 News; Phoenix, Az; Jesse Ramirez was considered fatally injured when his SUV crashed into a pottery store; his wife made the decision to pull his feeding tube out and Jesse went 6 days without food or water; all had prepared for his aforementioned death; shortly after hospice officials reported that Jesse was indeed awake and alert; he was transferred to a rehab center and put into recovery
4) 2/15/08; Andrusko/NRTL; Lake Elmo, Mn; 65 year-old Raleane Kupferschmidt’s relatives were told by doctors she was brain dead with no brain activity, and that she would not recover; a CT scan revealed she had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage a month earlier; doctors had removed her breathing tube and were waiting for her to die; but she began sucking on an ice cube and began to mouth words; later she exclaimed “God’s not done with me yet.”
5) 3/6/08; Baklinski/LifeSiteNews; Boston, Ma; Haleigh Poutre was so brutally beaten 2 years ago by her adoptive parents she was left in a coma not expected to revive; a CAT scan revealed a subdural hematoma (blood on surface of brain); as a ward of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services, Haleigh was to have all life support removed after only 6 days; the court decided to euthanize her, and shortly thereafter she began breathing on her own; her feeding tube was left in and she has recovered most of her cognitive abilities
One may notice that these 5 cases are actually only tips of the iceberg of people coming back from an assumed death. They are only a partial list of those considered dead for all practical purposes. Was God speaking to us, but we haven’t heard Him? If He just spoke outright, there would be no mystery, and thus no necessary faith. One would know that God and heaven exist for a fact, and there would be no decision to make.
But these situations only covered the last 10 months. What happened to all those in this condition before that? Did their loved ones not hear their cries for life? Was their feeding tube removed without knowing what would really happen in several years, months, or days? Were they even given a feeding tube to begin with?
Pope Benedict XVI recently stated that euthanasia “appears as one of the more alarming symptoms of the culture of death…”. Don’t we remember Pope John Paul XXIII taking sustenance through a feeding tube as he waved to onlookers through his upper window at the Vatican days before his death?
It’s easy to make the judgment that the existing life is not worth living, and opt for the death. One knows that many, who are not able to communicate in any way, are silently pleading to their killers that they are still alive. Life was started by God. It’s not ours to take. It’s not up to us to take another’s life whenever we’ve judged that it’s time. It seems that’ll come back to bite us sooner, or later.
Kevin Roeten
http://kevinroeten.us/
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