St. Luke, pray for us.

Another email I just sent:

To whom it may concern:

I find it dispicable that St. Luke's Hospital would use a law that exists in Texas to euthanize a patient who, very recently, vehemently expressed a strong desire to continue living. People go to hospitals for health care, not physicians who decide it's cheaper to let the patient die!

As a Houston resident, be assured that I and my family will stridently refuse to EVER go to your hospital should you lapse in your mission to protect and serve the healthcare needs of your patients in such a tragic and appaling manner. Believe me, I am very outspoken and involved in student life at Rice University. I can see to it that public opinion in my social circle of your facilities are rightly brought low if you should choose to abuse the trust that patients explicitly put in your hospital.

I'm not sure what is more horrifying, the fact that your hospital would rather kill her because her life costs money, or the fact that this is happening literally mere feet and yards away from where I work as a graduate student at Rice University.

I implore you to feel some compassion and have mercy, even should it cost your hospital dear financial resources, and not allow the untimely and deliberate death of this woman. Please consider if it were your mother, your child...

I recently read that St. Luke's Hospital now is forcing Andrea's family to choose IMMEDIATELY a tremendous and risky transfer to a different healthcare facility (one that is willing to actually give her healthcare and not kill her) or else refusing to assist in the cost of what is sure to be a complicated move.

Why must your hospital do this? Are you so appalled by her presence, are you so without mercy that you'll help pay $17,000 to just get the poor woman away from your hospital? What kind of hospital is this? What kind of ethics does your hospital run on? This is utterly unacceptable, in every way that I can possibly express.

Please, reconsider what you are doing to this poor woman and her family, please imagine what some compassion and caring could do rather than catering to the common fiscal denominator.

If the hospital believes me to be in error in my feelings, please respond with the hospital's statement on the issue, their response to the allegations that they are, in fact, deeming the death of this woman is better for them fiscally than her continued healthcare.

Good day,

Christopher Holterhoff

Biochemistry and Cell Biology Graduate Student
Rice University