05:37 PM CDT on Sunday, April 23, 2006

By Wendell Edwards / 11 News

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A life or death struggle is taking place at St. Luke’s Hospital, where doctors are planning to remove a woman from life support.

The patient is not brain dead, and according to her family, she wants to live.

KHOU-TV

Andrea Clark has been at St. Luke's since November.

They may be small in number, but the protesters said the bigger picture is the gravity of their message.

“They just say, ‘well she’s miserable.’ Well, to me that’s a quality of life decision that is up to her and her family,” Lanore Dixon said. “That is not a medical decision.”

Dixon is protesting on behalf of her sister Andrea Clark, a patient at St. Luke’s Hospital since November.

In January, the 54-year-old underwent open-heart surgery. The next month she developed bleeding on the brain.

Now an ethics committee has recommended removing her ventilator and taking her off life support.

But her family is fighting to stop that despite not having the law on their side.

“If their ethics committee makes a decision, it doesn’t matter what the patient wants,” Dixon said. “It doesn’t even apparently matter what the patient’s condition is, because our sister is not in a coma, she’s not brain dead,” Dixon said.

In fact, family members said even though their sister cannot speak, they know she wants to live. They said she communicates by moving her lips and blinking her eyes.

St. Luke’s has been in a similar position before.

Last spring its ethics committee made the same recommendation concerning Spiro Nikolozous, 68-year-old man in a persistent vegetative state.

His family moved him to San Antonio where he later died.

In an e-mailed statement, the hospital referred to it is confidentiality policy regarding patient privacy, saying it is precluded from commenting on Clark’s case unless the family provides written consent.

The family hasn’t done that, saying they are now fighting time and St. Luke’s Hospital. “She’s sick, but she’s been sick before and she’s proven doctors wrong lots of times,” Dixon said.  

It was a 1999 state law that gave hospitals the authority to remove patients from life support.

The only requirement is that the hospital must give a family 10 days notice to find another facility that would care for their loved one.

Andrea Clark’s family is trying to that, but if they are unsuccessful, Clark will be taken off life support April 30.