One day after 13-year-old brain dead Jahi MacMath was moved from a California children’s hospital to an undisclosed location, her family and lawyer finally concedes her situation is hopeless.
“Right now, we don’t know if she’s going to make it,” said attorney Christopher Dolan.
On Friday, a judge ruled the family could take the deceased eighth grader from Children’s Hospital Oakland to an undisclosed location. But Dolan admits the body is too badly deteriorated from decay and failing organs to save it.
“She’s in very bad shape,” Dolan said during a press conference at his law office Monday evening. “What I can tell you is that those examinations show that her medical condition, separate from the brain issue, is not good.”
Jahi has been ventilator-dependent since suffering a cardiac arrest after hemorrhaging following a tonsillectomy, sinus and upper palate surgical procedures to treat sleep apnea on Dec. 9.
Two hospital physicians and 3 independent doctors brought in by the family declared her brain dead with no blood flow or signs of electrical activity in her cerebrum.
But Jahi’s family refused to acknowledge her death. They clung to their religious beliefs and fought the hospital’s attempts to remove Jahi from the ventilator.
On Sunday, the hospital turned Jahi’s body over to the coroner who released the body to Jahi’s mother just before 8 p.m. A private ambulance was seen leaving the hospital loading dock with the body.
Dolan said Monday that Jahi is now receiving potassium, minerals and hormones through an IV. She is also receiving antibiotics for an infection. But she isn’t receiving nutrition due to “physical problems that do not allow surgical insertion of a feeding tube.”
Jahi was checked into an unnamed facility on Monday morning. The owner of a controversial brain injury center in NY who offered to take Jahi insisted that she needed time for her brain to recover from whole brain death.
“Her brain needs time to heal. It’s a new injury,” Scerri told CNN Sunday. “We believe in life after injury, all of us here at New Beginnings have first-hand experience because we have a loved one that was in the same situation as Jahi.”
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