Omri Ceren, with a heartbreaking quote from Ha’aretz, on prayer.
Photo essays at Boker Tov, Boulder: Praying for Sharon, and celebrating his misfortune. Guess which are from whom.
Kesher Talk, updating the news.
A consensus seems to be gathering that the doctors really screwed things up by giving Sharon blood thinners. And while that may indeed be the contributing factor, I would point out that pointing out that fact is not going to change what happened. Sharon has had a major cerebral hemorrhage, and will probably be incapacitated for life.
Terrorists in Gaza are promising a barrage of “celebratory” rockets into Israeli towns if Sharon dies.
“I am ready with my candies and my rockets and praying to Allah that Sharon dies. We have prepared a celebratory barrage of rockets ready to fire into Israel on the occasion of the death of our enemy,” said Abu Abir, spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella group of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists responsible for firing hundreds of Qassam rockets and mortars at Jewish towns.
Charming.
Soccer Dad points out that Sharon steamrollered his way over Israeli opinion to get his results, following in the tradition of many other Israeli Prime Ministers.
Lynn is back and points out that Sharon devoted his life to his country.
And last, Dave Bogner has nothing but contempt for those who see Ariel Sharon’s stroke as evidence of the hand of God (in a negative fashion). (Don’t miss the picture he has on the post.)
For those of us who wish to pray in the traditional Jewish manner, can you post his full Hebrew name — i.e. first and middle (if any) name followed by his mother’s first (and middle, if any) name?
Thanks. I tried to see whether the Haaretz article had this information, but could not get the page to load properly.
At times like this, it matters little that I still think the Gaza handover was a mistake and a disgrace.
Found the answer at Keshertalk — Ariel Ben Devorah.
May he have a refuah shelemah.
Yankev
A consensus seems to be gathering that the doctors really screwed things up by giving Sharon blood thinners.
Meryl, tone it down a bit, please? Using anticoagulants was only the wrong thing to do if his doctors had good reason to suspect that the risks would outweigh the benefits. Hindsight doesn’t count for much, and the speculation of those of us who aren’t his doctors—not even doctors at all—is worth even less.
With nothing but the news reports to go on (plus a little related education), my guess is this: His first, minor stroke was due to an embolism—a blood clot that lodged in a small cerebral blood vessel and deprived a portion of brain of blood. Treating those with anticoagulants is what you do. The source of the clot is suspected to be the septal defect, a hole in the wall between two of the heart’s chambers. Blood cells forced through the hole get damaged and tend to clot in the bloodstream, forming emboli. The septal defect is what they were supposed to be dealing with today, by catheterization.
Last night’s stroke was a different thing, a cerebral hemorrhage, and not predictable from the first stroke. Unless they miscalculated the dose of anticoagulant, or had some reason to fear catastrophic bleeding, there’s no screw-up.
It should be obvious that Israel has some of the best doctors in the world, and the Prime Minister has access to the best doctors in Israel. Anyone can screw up, but they probably didn’t. Plus there’s a fair chance that they’re good enough to be beating themselves up about Sharon today, without any help from us.
Paul, you’re mistaking my opinion for my reporting opinions. I am not a doctor, nor do I pretend to have an idea on Sharon’s treatment.
I’m in agreement with Paul M, above. Anti-coagulants are the standard treatment of the blood-clot type of stroke Sharon had the first time around. If the doctors hadn’t given him the blood thinners, and he’d had a second and more catastrophic clot-type stroke, the doctors would have been vilified for not preventing it. So they did what is standard procedure in such cases–gave him anticoagulants to try to prevent that from happening.
The only thing they might be faulted for is if they’d overdosed him, or for not operating to repair the heart defect sooner. That latter criticism, IMHO, might be correct–unless it was Sharon himself who wanted to postpone the surgery for some reason.
Like so many things in life, the treatment has its risks, but the risks were obviously felt to be lower than the risks of not treating. Of course, we now know that the treatment backfired, but this could not have been foreseen.
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Sharon has long gotten a lot of flack for being a hard-ass. Born in 1928, the next year saw Arab riots in Palestine that killed hundreds of Jews and destroyed the Jewish community of Hebron, all the Jews there killed or fled. When he was a teenager the Nazis tried to kill every Jew in the world, to the cheers of the Arabs, I might add. As a young officer he participated in the War of Independence, being badly wounded in the attacks on Latrun. He spent years fighting against Arab terrorism and commanded troops in three more wars with the Arabs. Throughout his life people have been trying to destroy his country and kill all his people, and he spent his life defending both. If Sharon is a hard-ass, he has good reason to be.
“It’s Tommy this an’ it’s Tommy that and it’s “Chuck ‘im out, the brute,”
But it’s “savior of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot…”
I don’t think he will make it this time. This time it looks like an implacable enemy finally will kill the old soldier. May The Lord bless and have mercy on him.