Here's a thread for you.
Both media and martyrdom played roles in the death of Bethany Hughes. The 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness was admitted to Calgary’s Alberta Children’s Hospital in February, 2002, with acute myeloid leukemia. Hughes’s doctors estimated her chance of survival was 65 per cent, provided she accepted an immediate blood transfusion and chemotherapy. Without treatment, she would die. Her father, Lawrence Hughes, felt intense religious conflict and sought advice from the Society, doctors and the Bible. Despite his efforts to discuss his concerns and treatment options, he was ignored and angrily shouted down by family and the many Elders who flooded the oncology ward. Two days after Bethany was admitted to the hospital, Hughes signed permission for the blood transfusions to begin and was immediately shunned by everybody he knew.
“She was in constant pain,” Hughes remembers. “She couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom. After the transfusion, she was almost back to normal!” The doctors gave her mere days to live, but the treatment gave her a chance. Over the next few months, Hughes watched his own daughter physically resist treatment as the Society fought to maintain their control. The blood transfusions were working, and with her cancer in remission, Bethany was discharged from the hospital on July 6, 2002, but Hughes never saw his daughter again. When Bethany relapsed, she was hidden in Edmonton and became an outpatient at the Cross Cancer Institute. On the Society’s recommendation, a course of non-blood, palliative care treatments for an entirely different disease began her rapid decline and by the end of August, she was confined to a wheelchair, blind and in pain. Bethany was rushed to the hospital on September 5, and she died the next day.
This idiocy has to stop.
I'll be there in October.
