Doctors deciding who will be allowed to fight to remain alive and who will be forced out of treatment is epidemic in the UK where nationalized health care combined with huge influence by utilitarian bioethicists results in some patients being thrown out of the lifeboat.

This is a case of a near miss. From the story:

Yvonne Sullivan, 28, lost consciousness suffering from severe blood poisoning moments after being told that baby Clinton had died. Despite grieving for their lost son, her husband Dominic, 37, kept a round-the-clock vigil at her bedside for two weeks as she lay in intensive care.

But when doctors told him they could have to switch off her life support machine, Mr Sullivan took drastic action–by giving his wife a firm telling-off. He held his wife’s hand and demanded: “You start fighting. Don’t you dare give up on me now. I’ve had enough, stop mucking around and start breathing. Come back to me.”

Two hours later she started to breathe steadily again.

This case is also an example of a supposedly unconscious woman–who wasn’t:

She even remembers hearing her husband yelling at her as she lay in a coma and says it gave her the strength to pull through.

She said: “I can’t remember exactly what he said but I never liked getting told off by Dom. Something inside me just clicked and I began to fight again. When I came round I thought he’d been gone a few minutes, then he told me I’d been out for two weeks. It’s a miracle. I owe him so much.”

We will never know how many such cases there are when patients who might have come back were cut off by doctor decision making. This is our future, too if we don’t stop Futile Care Theory.