Archie Battersbee case

[whynotwhatknot]

I was just wondering why we're not allowed to post about this case-the deletion message mentioned it was ongoing so wouldnt be fair to the family

Charlie gards case was on going and there was numerous threads about it

Anyway if this stands maybe we can discuss

she would rather have her child rot before her very eyes than give him the dignity he deserves and just switch off the machine

this is needlessly unkind.

I agree he isn’t ‘alive’ and should be allowed to die with dignity.

but I can’t bring myself to judge his mum or write such unkind things, she’s going through hell.

I don't think the thread is unkind ,but I agree to some extent in what you are saying, it's easy for us as on lookers to say we would turn off his life support but he's not our child i hope if I was ever in Hollie,s situation I would have the strength to let him go
The "army" however are really not helping.

Weird that this line gets trotted out so often. The very large majority of parents demonstrably don't do this.

We know that Archie’s brain is rotting and parts of it have fallen off and are located in his lumbar spine

I've read this lots of times, and it just seems implausible. The lumbar spine is lower back. Just above the pelvis. Are you sure something hasn't got lost in translation?

located in his spine ,particularly cervical spine, perhaps should read?

Not impossible at all, unfortunately. The whole of the brain and spine share the same cerebrospinal fluid which is how they can test for meningitis using a lumbar puncture.

Have you read the court judgements? It's all in there.

I can’t see why not - he obviously “coned” so brain tissue would have descended anyway and necrotic tissue is friable and breaks off easily. Then presumably parts of it just floated on down on the CSF.

Normally CSF is absorbed and remade continuously in the brain but obviously that won’t be happening; what’s there in his spinal cord must be pretty horrible by normal

I've read the Hayden judgement and can't see it there. I haven't read the earlier one.

It doesn't detract from the main point, which is his brain has disintegrated. It just seems an awfully long way for the fragments to have travelled!

I do feel for Hollie and I haven’t said anything unkind about her. I can’t imagine how I would feel. However, it is not all that unusual for parents to be told that their ventilated child has no hope of recovery. The overwhelming majority agree to withdraw life support. Maybe not immediately, but within a reasonable period, and certainly don’t take it to court.

that’s why this issue of not being able to do the peripheral nerve test to diagnose brain stem death hasn’t really caused a logistical problem before - most parents who are told their child’s brain stem is rotting away by every doctor who examines their child’s scans accept it.

Hollie’s response is very unusual even among people in her heartbreaking situation.

Parents make these decisions about their children all the time, every day.

It’s extremely, extremely unusual to choose to ventilate a body for over 3 months when they are dead.

Maybe I should have phrased it better - Archie has significantly deteriorated and I cannot see how his mum / family / army can say he is looking healthy / putting on weight etc. he literally is a shadow of his former self and that is only because he has technically died. Archie is no longer there. His family and army can keep fighting but the evidence is there to show that day by day, Archie’s poor body cannot keep going. Where is the dignity in being shown to the world like this, when he should be cared for with private dignity? I did not mean to appear unkind but I cannot fathom how people in the army could think there is any coming back from this.

I’m pretty sure it’s in the High Court one.

It’s not far if you consider that it’s floating down in a liquid

www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2022/1435.html&query=(Battersbee)

paragraphs 85 to 95 deal with it (this is the first high court judgment of Arbuthnot J). I’m not a medic to comment on what it means but it does refer to necrotic debris from higher up which had fallen into the lumbar spine.

Thinking about the CSF further : normally CSF flows through the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and is reabsorbed and made continuously, in specific parts of the brain.

However, with a dead brain that won’t be happening so presumably the same fluid has been stagnating, around his spinal cord, for months now. For some reason that strikes me as particularly horrific. Or maybe it eventually just dries out if it can’t be made?

It is long and grim reading. Here is the part people are referring to when they say his brain is rotting and bits of it are in his spine (which is an awful way of putting it but they are of course being unnecessarily blunt to reinforce the point some people are missing - necrosis cannot be healed)

cord. Some decaying parts of the brain are seen to have dropped down Archie's spine and to be sitting in the lumbar region of his spinal cord

From para 176

Anyone watching BBC breakfast, a family on there with a child desperately waiting for a new heart. Some good could have come from Archie's death. But now there will be nothing. The family could have found comfort in that. I know people who have made that decision and it's been a great comfort for them.

I don’t need convincing that Archie is dead, that he isn’t coming back, that the media circus is distasteful etc. and ultimately the right thing to do would be to switch off the life support. I just find a bunch of unrelated strangers indulgently stating ‘oh I would do X Y and Z if it were me, how could she let him stay like that’ to be really unkind and arrogant.

Most people wouldn't ignore multiple specialists all saying the same thing over three months, no. Nor make pretty damaging claims that the hospital are trying to kill him, they're deliberately starving him, they want to "harvest his organs", or that the judge is a murderer.

This thread isn't particularly critical of his mum - everyone is pretty empathetic to what a horrendous situation she's in.

It's critical of people like the CLC who are exploiting the family for their own ends (see their anti-abortion views too - nicely ties into all this "heartbeats" talk and sancity of life), and the "army" which are made up of strangers who are enabling Hollie & giving her false hope.

And there's also the issue @Wouldloveanother that the family are saying one thing in court (that they understand he will sadly die soon, and has no prospect of recovery), and another on social media (he will recover & get back to normal).

This has led to an awful lot of money being raised on gofundme based on this (money for treatment, rehab, legal fees), which is partly why the courts asked the laywers to confirm several times they're working pro bono.

I am hopeful that the family will donate the money to somewhere meaningful when this is over, but in previous cases it has just mysteriously disappeared.

This is a discussion @Wouldloveanother - people have a right to voice their opinions and I’m sure if we were in the same situation as Hollie then yes, we may make the strange decisions she has. What we are discussing is how, as a parent, could she not see what the medics are saying as fact and do what is right by her son. You don’t have to keep saying how unkind and arrogant we are - we are just thinking of Archie and how he would think of all this, as well as the implications of keeping a bed kept for a case without hope. My own children have desperately required beds when they were very, very unwell and thinking that a body is kept in one at the request of the mother when there was no hope at all, just beggars belief.

But I think his mother said she fought and got him a school place?

Archie's family have opened this up for public discussion. The Facebook page and go fund me were created within a couple of days of his hanging, there has been lots of very open and public discussion - interviews on GB news and this morning and so on. The world is not an echo chamber, it is human nature to read and think and examine the facts and discuss them and some people will come to conclusions that others aren't going to agree with. Some people feel really strongly that what she's doing is very wrong - filming Archie in his hospital bed etc. Everyone I have seen discussing this has been respectful of Archie and thoughtful to his medical condition and his needs. He's the one at the centre of all this, not his mother.

Ah you maybe right .