“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.

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.

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.

May he have a refuah shelemah.
Yankev

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.