A lawsuit has been filed against two Kansas jails over the death of an inmate that allegedly could have been prevented. Terry A. Bruner was arrested for DUI in November 2007 and sent to Sedgwick County Jail, but was transferred to the Stanton County Jail due to overcrowding. The lawsuit alleges he spent the next four of five days being bounced between the jails even though he was seriously ill with streptococcal meningitis. By the time jail officials took …

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A quadriplegic man who won a court case allowing him to starve himself to death died last month in the nursing home in which he was a resident. He was 49 years old.
Christian Rossiter was a resident of the Brightwater Care Group nursing facility in Marangaroo, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia. Admitted in November 2008, Mr. Rossiter became a quadriplegic as a result of three serious injuries. The first of these occurred in 1988 when he fell 100 feet from an apartment from which he suffered head …

As a nursing student I came face to face with the realities of life and death and suffering early on. The events of that week are forever etched in my mind. It was my second clinical rotation and I was in Med-Surg where I was assigned to a middle aged black woman. She was a round woman with wandering eyes and a kind heart. She gladly accepted this student as her personal care giver for the week. Her diagnosis was Myasthenia gravis.

Myasthenia gravis is a neuromuscular disease which is characterized …