A senior physician who is an expert in intensive care and comas told Haaretz on Sunday that, according to reports by doctors treating Sharon, if the prime minister's condition persists into next week - he is still unconscious and connected to a respirator - he may be defined as being in a vegetative state.
One can come out of a long coma and be fine but that is typically due to brainstem injury, not cortex injury as is presumed to be the case here. However, it is difficult to say this with great certainty since the scans have not been released.
A senior Health Ministry official told Haaretz on Sunday that he thought the cabinet should establish a commission that will investigate the treatment Sharon has received at Hadassah University Hospital, the functioning of his two personal physicians and various governmental, public and medical questions.
The senior official said the matter of the non-disclosure of some of the information about Sharon's condition should be examined, along with: the decision to administer blood thinners to the prime minister, despite the vascular disease in his brain; the controversial decision to perform a catheterization to repair the hole in his heart; his release from hospital and quick return to work after his first stroke; and the fact that he stayed at his home in Sycomore Ranch in the Negev, far from Hadassah.
Another leading expert has now spoken out on the opinion IRIS expressed fifteen minutes into the story:
Sharon's comatose state and the fact that he is undergoing the tracheotomy do not bode well for the prime minister's future, said Dr. Philip Stieg, chair of neurosurgery at the Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York.
It is becoming more probable as time passes that Sharon will either remain in a vegetative state or have low abilities to think and reason, said Stieg, who is not involved in Sharon's care.
'It suggests that the brain damage is as serious as we thought it was based on earlier reports and now its all playing out,' Stieg said. 'He's not turning the corner, he's not waking up...they're having to do more things to keep him alive.
Nevertheless,
a highly suspect decision with potentially enormous political implications has been made by the Attorney General to
rule that Sharon is temporarily (not permanently) incapacitated. The result of that ruling determined that Ehud Olmert would be the acting Prime Minister and therefore the leading contender for Prime Minister in the upcoming election. Olmert was elevated from political obscurity by this twist of affairs. In the last Knesset election he was in the 33rd position on the Likud list.
