Boys Miraculous Fight With Death Reveals Frightening Medical Practices

In the medical community, it is easy to try to play God.

With all the advances in life-saving procedures and pharmaceuticals, doctors contribute to some pretty amazing recoveries.

Then there are times when medical intervention or a doctor’s direction for care strikes a losing hand in the gamble of life.

For a young boy in Alabama, a physician’s professional diagnosis almost cost him his life and his organs.

Fox News reported:

A 13-year-old boy who was said to be suffering severe brain injury defied odds when he regained consciousness after his parents had signed papers to donate his organs.

Trenton McKinley, of Mobile, Ala., was hospitalized two months ago after a small utility trailer he was in flipped over.

“I hit the concrete and the trailer landed on top of my head. After that, I don’t remember anything,” Trenton told Fox 10.”

Trenton had major injuries after the accident. Diagnosed with seven skull fractures, doctors told the scared parents their son “would never be normal again”, according to Fox News.

The hospital Trenton was taken to was quick to decide that he was a lost cause. Jennifer Reindl, Trenton’s mom, was convinced that after her son was resuscitated that nothing could be done for him, and his organs should be harvested for children in need.

People want to trust their doctors. We should be able to trust that what a doctor is telling us is all the information and in the best interest of the patient.

Unfortunately, past cases have shown the public that not only are second opinions always necessary in severe medical situations but that sometimes the doctor’s choice of care is based on circumstantial evidence.

Fox News reported on the horrifying moment when Reindl saw Trenton dead, and the events that followed:

All I saw was a stretcher with his feet hanging out. He was dead a total of 15 minutes,” Trenton’s mother, Jennifer Reindl, told Fox 10. “When he came back, they said he would never be normal again. They told me the oxidation problems would be so bad to his brain, that he would be a vegetable if he even made it.”

Trenton was barely breathing in the days following the crash, Fox 10 reported. His mother ultimately decided to sign papers to donate Trenton’s organs that would benefit five children who needed transplants.”

In an unexpected turn of events, the 13-year-old fighter once again had brain activity, merely one day before life support was to be ceased.

When Trenton awoke, he was speaking full sentences, and breathing on his own, according to a Facebook fundraising page his mom wrote on.

Recovery will not be easy for the young man. He has had daily seizures, and intense nerve pain, not including his three brain surgeries and one more to come.

A major procedure to reconnect a missing piece of Trenton’s skull is to be done in the near future, according to Fox News.

What happened to Trenton was tragic, and it also brings to light issues concerning doctors trying to make claim to what does and does not constitute as a life.

Questions are being asked in the area of ethics and medicine concerning whether a doctor should be able to omit offering treatment if they don’t feel it is worth it.

In the Journal of Medical Ethics, E Gedge, M Giacomini, and D Cook write:

Most guidance documents declared that doctors are under no obligation to offer treatment they consider futile, but the valueladen notion of futility and the ambiguous meaning of patient autonomy suggest the need for further ethical analysis.”

Trenton’s case is not a rarity either. There has been dozens of documented incidents where individuals were declared brain dead by the doctor in charge of their care, only to defy odds and make a miraculous recovery.

Real Science Radio reported on a girl who was moments from having her organs taken as well before she woke up, despite her not having a chance at life by the doctors standards:

August 2016 – Nineteen days after her car flipped over, the doctors of 22-year-old Sam Hemming were about to give up on her because she was obviously “brain dead” “with no hope of recovery”. Yet moments before she would likely have died from their withdrawing her care, Sam wiggling her toe. From there, fighting back, she made a tremendous recovery in only weeks. Mental and physical exercise has reprogrammed the undamaged side of her brain!”

The medical community and many laypeople understand being “brain dead” as being officially dead.

When a person suffers a brain injury, then doesn’t respond to pain, has no brain stem reflexes, shows no difference in carbon dioxide levels in the blood after being withdrawn from the respirator, the hospital says that’s a done deal, you’re dead to them; literally.

Sometimes, the body needs time to reroute the damaged areas of the brain and to heal. We see this in other brain injuries.

How can a doctor in good conscience, continue to fully support this method of declaring death, when history has proven it doesn’t pass the simple scrutiny of the scientific method.

Don’t blindly follow the advice of every doctor.

It is well within your rights to ask more than one professional advice, to ask questions that might illicit anger, such as “Can you say this with 100% certainty beyond a shadow of a doubt?”

When you do, it may save a life.

Please let us know in the comments section if you have heard of stories like this one, and if you have had to confront a doctor on their medical decision before.