Baby Riley’s Operation
It was reported on the TV news this evening that baby Riley Carlsen came through his operation successfully.
The operation was not a treatment, it was to insert a feeding tube and a catheter in preparation for kidney dialysis at a later date. The chief pediatrition at Children’s Hospital said that the dialysis would be a replacement for lost kidney function.
Dialysis is only necessary when the kidneys are no longer cleaning waste out of the blood as they should. That seems to me a pretty black and white question. Either the kidneys are doing their job or they’re not.
Kidney failure will ultimately lead to death.
I’m still not sure what Riley’s diagnosis is, his prognosis without dialysis, or what improvement he had seen from “alternative” therapies. But from what I heard today, it sounds like he had not improved from other treatments to the point where there was any confidence on the part of pediatricians that he could survive without dialysis.
The just wonder how he has survived for nine months without dialysis if his kidneys are not functioning properly. I’ve seen a clip on more than one station of Tina Marie Carlsen, Riley’s mother, saying that she was told when he was three days old that he “needed emergency dialysis or she could take him home and let nature take it’s course.”
Obviously, if he’s survived for nine months without dialysis, it wasn’t an emergency.
UPDATE 7/1/06: This morning’s article in the Seattle-PI gives a little more detail about Riley’s medical condition.
Despite his mother’s tearful courtroom objections, Riley Rogers had surgery Friday afternoon, paving the way for dialysis to treat his underfunctioning kidneys.
[…]
After an hourlong process to insert a shunt in the child’s abdomen, Dr. Bruder Stapleton, pediatrician in chief at Children’s, reported that Riley was awake, stable and in no pain. His mother, the doctor added, was in the hospital after winning permission for a supervised visit with her baby.
“He’s come through the surgery very well,” Stapleton said, adding that although the procedure had not been an emergency, without it Riley’s kidney function would have continued to degenerate, weakening his bones and stunting his growth.
The KING-5 TV news just reported during their 7AM news broadcast that Riley is now on dialysis awaiting a kidney transplant.
If it wasn’t an emergency, then the state supposedly doesn’t have the right to take control even under their own rules, as noted in a previous article.
“Basically the state isn’t supposed to take custody of the child unless there’s imminent harm,” said Lisa Kelly, who teaches family law at the UW. “That’s what’s interesting here, whether there was indeed imminent harm to this child.”
The chief of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital just admitted that it wasn’t an emergency.
Once Riley has a transplant, he’s in for a lifetime of medical care and dependency on doctors.
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