We Live in a Fucked-up Country

This is not news, I know. But sometimes I read stories that remind me quite bluntly how really fucked-up it is. This is one of those stories:

A disabled foster child whose liver is failing has been removed from a Central Florida hospital's organ-transplant waiting list because hospital administrators fear the state's shaky child-welfare system cannot ensure he has a permanent home in which to recover.

Shands Hospital in Gainesville removed the boy, 15, from a waiting list for organ recipients after administrators determined the boy's unstable living conditions make him a poor candidate for a transplant, said Nick Cox, the Department of Children & Families regional administrator in the Tampa Bay area, where the boy lives.

I mean, I know I'm Caption Obvious here and all, but denying a developmentally disabled child with advanced liver disease a transplant because he has the unmitigated temerity to be homeless is just a whole new shade of fucked-up on the spectrum.

[Arthur Caplan, chairman of the medical ethics department at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school] said it is unreasonable to require the state to guarantee the boy will be in a permanent home for at least two years [after the transplant], given that even children who are not in foster care can't make such guarantees. ''That is a bar a little too high,'' Caplan said.

Transplant teams routinely accept pledges from recovering alcoholics that they will never drink again after accepting a donated liver, or promises that smokers will quit smoking once they receive a new heart, Caplan said. Why should a foster child be required to do more than that? he asked.

''It is absolutely unethical to deny a transplant to a child because you don't have a home setting that is stable or parents who can help with compliance with the treatment,'' Caplan said. "That's why you have child-caring agencies and foster care. That's what child welfare should be doing.''

Indeed. And let me be clear that I'm not just faulting the hospital, which, as Shaker KathleenB—who gets the hat tip—fairly points out, does have to take into consideration that "recovering from transplant surgery is no walk in the park, though it's easier on the recipient than on a living donor. And he'll need to be on immunosupressants, which have to be taken on a strict schedule, moving from foster home to foster home isn't conducive to that." The problem is, of course, that the state is failing to provide adequate care for its ward.

DCF tried to arrange for him to live in a medical foster home in Gainesville so he could be near the hospital during the lengthy recovery process, but child-welfare workers were unable to find a specially trained home that would accept him.

Obviously, his situation makes him hard to place with a permanent family, too—but, given that this is all taking place in the state of Florida, I'm wondering how it is that none of the numpties who held vigil over Terri Schiavo, screaming about her right to life, have seen fit to step forward and offer this boy a home.



No room at the inn?
I guess a developmentally disabled teenage boy with liver disease and behavioral problems, who was "removed from his mother at infancy because she could not kick a crack cocaine habit," isn't the compelling story that a braindead woman who never would have been their problem was.

I can't even tell you how much I hope this gets resolved, and quickly, in this boy's favor.

[H/T to Shaker Kathleen(B).]