Inhumane Treatment

Can you imagine NOT being with a loved one as he/she lies in a hospital dying?

When I read what happened to Lisa Pond and her family, fury doesn't begin to describe my feelings. Lisa and her partner, Janice Langbehn, followed all possible legal steps to execute their Living Wills and Advanced Directives. Then tragedy struck as the family was out of town on vacation. Yet, both the hospital that treated Lisa for a brain aneurysm and the judge that heard the case brought by Janice and their children ignored the VALID LEGAL DOCUMENTS in favor or their own perverse biogtry!

I can't even begin to verbalize to anguish I feel for for Janice and the children--to be denied access to their wife and mother as she lay dying alone in a strange hospital in a strange city--because this could have easily been me fifteen years ago.

My husband and I were living together at the time, not yet married when he fell ill over the weekend. What started as an assumed stomach bug turned out to be cancer. Stage 3 cancer.

At the time, I had no legal right to make decisions for DH, much less be with him, but his surgeon had this thing called compassion. I was allowed back in the emergency room after I drove DH to the hospital. For all intents and purposes, Dr. Polder and the staff at Blanchard Valley Hospital in Findlay, Ohio, treated me as DH's wife. I was kept abreast of all tests, diagnosis and developments.

I could have easily been left in the waiting room like Janice and the children.

When we start denying one person's rights, where does it stop? Do the people that espouse this type of hatred really think that they're safe from their own deity's judgment?

As for social worker Garnet Frederick and doctors Alois Zauner and Carlos Alberto Cruz at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida, and U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan, I have one thing to say:

Whether it's called the Golden Rule, the Three-Fold Law, or Karma, you'll receive the justice you deserve in the end.