border=0> Steve and Michele Kubby

Just nine days after being released from Placer County Jail because of good behavior and overcrowded conditions, Steven Wynn Kubby is behind bars again – this time on charges of violating probation.

The 59-year-old medical marijuana advocate turned himself in at the jail late Wednesday to begin a 60-day sentence imposed the preceding day by Superior Court Judge Robert McElhany, who ruled that Kubby had violated probation when he moved to Canada in 2001 with his wife, Michele, and the couple’s two young daughters to avoid a sentence for drug possession.

A co-author of California’s voter-approved Compassionate Use Act and the 1998 gubernatorial candidate for the Libertarian Party, Kubby seemed in far better spirits than at the beginning of his earlier stint.

“I know everyone at the jail now so I told them – Get my suite ready,” he joked to WorldNetDaily.

Kubby, who has used marijuana for three decades to treat a fatal and incurable form of adrenal cancer, was incarcerated Jan. 27, following his arrest the evening before at San Francisco International Airport when his flight arrived from Vancouver, B.C.

In a surprise move by county officials, Kubby was released from custody March 6, having served 40 days of the 120-day sentence handed down in 2001 for possession of a psychedelic mushroom stem and a couple of peyote buttons seized during a raid by sheriff deputies on his home near Lake Tahoe in January 1999. His medi-pot garden of marijuana plants – the reason for the bust – was also confiscated, but prosecutors were unable to convince the jury that Kubby was growing these for sale to compassion clubs rather than for legal personal use.

The release ended his sentence for drug possession, but Kubby still faced a possible three years in state prison for violating his probation. He and his counsel hoped the prosecutor would drop any charges or that a judge would dismiss them.

Christopher Cattran, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Kubby on the marijuana and drug possession charges six years ago, still has control of the case and was pressing for a 240-day sentence. But during a closed-door session between attorneys for the two sides, Cattran agreed to a recommendation by the Probation Department and asked for 90 days’ home detention. Kubby says even that would be too long.

“I told the judge that if I have to sit around somewhere for three months, instead of being able to be out and earning a living to take care of my family, I’d just as soon go to jail,” he said.

McElhany apparently not only agreed, he knocked 30 days off – reducing the time from 90 to 60 days. If overcrowding at the jail continues and Kubby accumulates good behavior credits, it’s possible he’ll be out in as few as 30 or even 20 days.

“There are no guarantees that’ll happen,” Kubby said. “But 60 days are better than 90; and a lot better than the 240 they started out at.”

Cattran told the Sacramento Bee that he feels a 60-day term for probation violation is “a little light,” adding that Kubby was placed on three years’ probation before going to Canada.

“I believe there should be a just sentence for what he did – he was gone for five years,” he complained.

Kubby suffers from locally recurrent and metastatic pheochromocytoma, a cancer of the inner core of the adrenal gland that stimulates overproduction of a group of hormones called catecholemines, which include epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine. The constant overproduction causes episodes of soaring blood pressure, resulting in blinding headaches, strokes and even cardiac arrest. There is no cure for this rare but deadly cancer. Patients diagnosed with it can expect to live at most 10 years.

By the time of his 2000 trial on pot-selling charges, Kubby had survived over 23 years using marijuana to treat his disease.

It wasn’t fear of incarceration as such that drove Kubby into self-imposed exile, but of being forced to forgo his use of marijuana. He was afraid – and doctors who examined him agreed – that without cannabis, the cancer he’d managed to keep in check for so many years would likely reassert itself and spread quickly to his heart, brain and other vital organs.

“I believed my life was on the line,” he said.

Top cancer specialists who examined and treated him at USC Medical Center in Los Angeles in 1998, and later at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver, backed Kubby’s assessment and warned that if deprived of marijuana he could die very quickly. They urged authorities to allow him access to cannabis in some form. Their requests were ignored.

New use for Marinol

While in jail Kubby will be allowed to use Marinol (dronabinol), as he was during his recent stay.

Marinol is a legal, synthetic form of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, one of the most active ingredients in marijuana. It is prescribed to control the nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy, but not recognized or prescribed as a blood pressure medication.

Fortunately, Kubby found it worked for him to curb the potentially lethal spikes in blood pressure, and thinks it might help others.

“I have several tumors that are producing catecholomines,” he explained. “But when I take marijuana or Marinol it interferes with the production by those tumors of the catecholomines.

“So this is a new use for [Marinol]. And that’s very, very significant because there’s no other medicine that controls blood pressure at the source, at the production of catecholomines. Every other medicine interferes with the effects of the catecholomines – through alpha blockers, beta blockers, channel blockers, things like that. Besides cannabis, only Marinol – at least in my case – has been able to actually control the amount of catecholomines produced.

“That is a brand-new kind of blood pressure medication that’s working at the source,” he said.

Documents and information regarding the Kubby case are posted at www.kubby.com.

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Medical marijuana champion free

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Medical marijuana is no hoax ]]> http://www.wnd.com/2006/03/35285/feed/ 0 http://www.wnd.com/2006/03/35227/ http://www.wnd.com/2006/03/35227/#comments Tue, 14 Mar 2006 01:00:00 +0000 Sarah Foster http://wp.wnd.com/?p=35227

Steven Wynn Kubby, co-author of California’s watershed medical marijuana law and the Libertarian Party’s 1998 gubernatorial candidate, is a free man – at least for now.

border=0> Steve and Michele Kubby

The outspoken “reefer refugee” was quietly released March 6 from the Placer County Jail, having served 40 days of a four-month sentence handed down in 2001 for felony possession of a couple of peyote buttons and a shriveled psychedelic mushroom stem seized during a raid by sheriff deputies on his home near Lake Tahoe in January 1999. Kubby’s medi-pot garden of marijuana plants in various stages of growth – the reason for the bust – was also confiscated, but county prosecutors failed to convince the jury that Kubby was growing these for sale to compassion clubs rather than for his legal personal use.

Kubby, 59, who has used marijuana for three decades to treat a fatal and incurable form of adrenal cancer, was incarcerated Jan. 27, following his arrest the evening before at San Francisco International Airport when his flight arrived from Vancouver, B.C.

But Kubby’s newly granted freedom could be brief. He’s due in court today when prosecutors will announce whether they want him to face charges of violating his probation by moving to Canada five years ago. He could receive anything from a dismissal of charges to three years in state prison. Placer County District Attorney Chris Cattron, who prosecuted Kubby on the marijuana selling and other drug charges six years ago, is still in charge of the case.

“My lawyer will argue it was medical necessity,” Kubby told WorldNetDaily. “I had the court’s permission to go to Canada, and once I was in Canada I was abandoned by the public defender, so I made the only choice I could – and that was to protect my health and stay.”

Kubby – with his wife, Michele, and the couple’s two young daughters, ages 6 and 9 – has lived in British Columbia since May 2001 to avoid incarceration, a punishment doctors warned could prove fatal since he would not have access to marijuana. Four months is not a long sentence, but there’s not a jail in the country that allows inmates, even those stricken with terminal cancer, to use cannabis in any form.

He was afraid – and doctors who examined him concurred – that without marijuana the cancer he’d been able to keep in remission for over 20 years might reassert itself and quickly spread to his heart, brain and other vital organs.

“I believed my life was on the line,” he said.

Kubby repeatedly sought permission to remain in Canada as a political refugee on the grounds that he was targeted for prosecution by Placer County authorities in 1998, in part because of his role in the passage of the Compassionate Use Act by voters two years earlier, which legalized the use of cannabis for medicinal purposes in California.

border=0> The Kubby family

Since medical marijuana is legal in Canada (as it technically is in California), the government there granted Kubby a medi-pot exemption but turned down his pleas for refugee status. A Canadian judge rejected his final appeal in January and ordered him to leave the country on his own or be forcibly deported. The Kubbys took the first option.

The early release from jail came on the heels of a contrary ruling issued by a court just three days before.

At a March 3 hearing, Placer County Superior Court Judge John Cosgrove summarily rejected a motion by Kubby’s attorney, J. David Nick, to reconsider the sentence and ruled that he was to complete the 120-day stint behind bars.

“The defendant has been sentenced. … I don’t see that Mr. Kubby is eligible for another sentencing,” Cosgrove said. “Request denied.”

Cosgrove also refused to modify the terms of Kubby’s probation or allow alternatives to jail, such as house arrest.

Officials say the release was prompted by good behavior on Kubby’s part (they describe him as a “model prisoner”) and overcrowding at the county jail.

Placer County Undersheriff Steve D’Arcy said Kubby was one of 47 inmates released from the jail since Feb. 28 under a federal court order that prohibits overcrowding, the Sacramento Bee reported.

“We have roughly 600 beds for prisoners and it is a constant balancing act of bringing in fresh arrests and releasing people who have followed all the jail rules and gotten credit for good behavior and for time served,” said D’Arcy.

The first few days in custody were stressful, and Kubby’s blood pressure soared dangerously high. Friends and supporters feared he’d die unless he received cannabis in some form, either inhaled or ingested. He was allowed to take Marinol – a legal, synthetic form of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, one of the most active ingredient in marijuana.

Kubby said he found that the Marinol helped curb the potentially lethal surges in blood pressure, but it also caused indigestion, and he has not tolerated it well. Plus the price is astronomical – $23 a pill, and he needs three or four a day. The cost is being paid by donations.

Nick told WorldNetDaily that his client’s health deteriorated during his six weeks in custody, as reported in Internet postings. He lost 25 pounds and “appeared emaciated” at the March 3 hearing.

A ‘medical miracle’

Kubby suffers from locally recurrent and metastatic pheochromocytoma, a cancer of the inner core of the adrenal gland that stimulates overproduction of a group of hormones called catecholemines, which include epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine. The constant overproduction causes blood pressure to soar, resulting in blinding headaches, strokes and cardiac arrest. It’s a very rare cancer but deadly. And there is no cure. Patients diagnosed with it can expect to live at most 10 years.

In 1976, doctors told Kubby he had six months to live. Twenty-two years later, he was very much alive, athletic, politically active and running for the governorship of California.

“I should be dead. That’s what doctors recently told me after completing extensive medical tests [in 1998] at the University of Southern California’s School of Medicine,” Kubby declared in a piece he wrote for WorldNetDaily in 1999. “According to Dr. Vincent DeQuattro, a USC professor and world authority on adrenal cancer, my blood shows lethal levels of adrenaline.

“That’s not really surprising, since everyone who has ever had my disease has died within a few years. Except for me. Thanks to medical marijuana, I’m now entering my 23rd year of survival, something DeQuattro considers a ‘medical miracle.’

“Dr. DeQuattro even wrote a letter advising [the court] that I could suffer a heart attack or stroke if deprived of marijuana and that no other form of therapy is available.”

In 2006, that 23-year benchmark is 30 years.

In a strange quirk of fate, DeQuattro had treated Kubby at L.A. County-USC Medical Center during the early 1980s. Before his tragic death in 2001, he was head of the medical center’s Hypertension Diagnostic Laboratory. Astonished to see his former patient’s name in the California voter’s pamphlet for the November 1998 election, he contacted him to find out how he’d managed to survive.

“He told me that he was treating himself with the advice of his physicians in northern California with marijuana, and has been taking no other medical therapy for several years,” DeQuattro declared in his 1999 letter to the Placer County Superior Court.

Kubby was subjected to a battery of tests that revealed lethal levels of adrenal hormones – 10 to 20 times normal – in his system. But for reasons that neither DeQuattro nor the other specialists could explain, cannabis appeared to be curbing the effects of the cancer and keeping it in remission.

As DeQuattro put it: “In some amazing fashion, this medication has not only controlled the symptoms of the pheochromocytoma, but in my view has arrested its growth. I strongly endorse that you consider supplying Steve with sufficient supplies of his specific marijuana product in order to control his life threatening disease. …

“Faith healers would term Steve’s existence these past 10-15 years as nothing short of a miracle. In my view, this miracle, in part, is related to the therapy with marijuana. Marijuana contains many substances which can neutralize the effects of epinephrine and norepinephrine on the heart and vascular tissue.”

DeQuattro monitored Kubby’s condition, treating the cancer with drugs and other conventional treatments. In the early 1980s, he referred him to Dr. James Sisson at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor for experimental radiation therapy and to the Mayo Clinic, at which time he lost touch with him and assumed he’d died.

‘You’ve got six months to live’

Kubby was first diagnosed with pheochromocytoma in 1969, and doctors removed the tumor and his right adrenal gland at that time. That is the standard treatment for pheochromocytomas – most of which are benign. Only about 10 percent are malignant and deadly. His was one of them.

According to Michele Kubby, his health seemed normal for six years. Then in 1975 a blood pressure test revealed something was very wrong. Two operations followed – in 1975 and 1976. The tumor had returned and his cancer had metastasized to his liver and other organs.

“He was 28 years old, and there wasn’t much they could do. So they removed a lot of the stuff and sewed him up and said, ‘Well, you have six months to live,’” she told WND.

Kubby and his doctors fought the disease with all the weapons available in the arsenal of modern medicine.

“He did the chemotherapy, he did the radiation, and he was living on alpha and beta blockers,” Michele said. “They had to give him such high amounts of blood pressure medication that he’d lie in bed completely comatose all day long, in constant pain, nauseous – and just ready to die.”

But he explored other forms of therapy, eventually giving up on conventional methods of dealing with the disease and developing a regimen based on a restricted diet and inhalation of cannabis. So far it’s worked.

The only survivor

When DeQuattro re-established contact in 1998 he contacted Sisson as well, who told him that every patient other than Kubby with the same condition had died: “Steve was the only survivor.”

Four years later, cancer specialist Joseph Connors, chair of the Lymphoma Tumor Group at the prestigious BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver, examined Kubby for the Canadian government and reached essentially the same conclusions as DeQuattro.

“When locally recurrent or metastatic pheochromocytoma cannot be effectively treated with surgical removal or radio-MIBG, as is true in this case, it is incurable,” Connors said in a recent letter to Michele Kubby summarizing his assessment and recommendations.

“Empiric attempts to control the symptoms with marijuana proved successful, making this the current treatment of choice for his disease. For this reason, I have recommended continued medicinal use of inhaled marijuana for control of his potentially life-threatening catecholamine-related symptoms.”

As for Kubby’s battle with Placer County law enforcement, Connors commented to WorldNetDaily: “I can’t see what useful purpose is being served in forcing him not to use marijuana. It is apparently doing him some substantial good, and I don’t see why he can’t simply be permitted access to it while he proceeds through whatever other matters the courts wish to pursue. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Connors, who was Kubby’s physician in cancer-related matters, described his patient as being a “physically active man in excellent health – but he harbors this tumor that makes [catecholamines] that put his life in jeopardy.”

“If he’s in trouble with the law, that’s between him and the law, and I think they should follow through and do whatever they think they need to do,” he added. “But I don’t see what purpose is being served by putting his health and life in jeopardy during that time by forcefully depriving him of access to something that – with his years of experience using it – is apparently keeping him healthy.”

Documents and information regarding the Kubby case are posted at www.kubby.com.

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With Congress scheduled to adjourn at the end of the week, the Bush administration and Republican leadership on Capitol Hill are working around-the-clock in an all-out effort to secure passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement before the August recess.

The Senate approved the controversial trade bill 54-45 on June 30, but opponents of the measure within the House of Representatives have maintained a steady resistance. Critics include not only Democrats, but Republicans concerned about CAFTA’s threat to U.S. independence and its potential to draw American manufacturing jobs south of the border.

To rally support within Republican ranks, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., has requested “full attendance” of all members of the GOP Conference to attend a special meeting at 9 a.m. today, at which George W. Bush will speak. As is the conference’s policy, no staffers, no media, and no Democratic members of the House will be admitted to hear the president.

The House Republican Conference, made up of GOP members, exerts strong control over the legislative agenda, according to the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste. “The conference holds closed-door meetings to explicitly detail the party’s message on issues and to ensure that members vote accordingly,” CAGW reports.

No one knows when the vote on CAFTA will occur, but it could come as early as this afternoon. Or – as Tom DeLay put it – “it could come at 4 in the morning, “whenever we have the votes.”

Some 218 votes are needed for passage, and critics and proponents predict the outcome will be extremely close. Indeed, it could be decided by just one vote.

The insider publication Congress Daily reported yesterday that 123 House members plan to vote “yes” or are leaning toward “yes,” with 172 members planning to vote or leaning to vote “no.” That leaves 138 members who are undecided or not saying.

“That’ why President Bush is making a special effort to talk to House Republicans behind closed doors,” Kent Snyder, executive director of the Liberty Committee, told WorldNetDaily. “They know how close this vote is going to be. They know the grass-roots constituents from around the country are rallying against it, so they’re doing everything they can – selling bridges, giving away bridges, making promises they’ll never keep, they’re doing everything they can to get this through.

“Bush is going to put on the heavy hand, and if the leadership feels they have the votes they will walk out and give House members short notice that the vote is coming up. They want the whole thing over within 15 minutes.”

Snyder and the Liberty Committee have played a major role in mobilizing opposition to CAFTA within Republican ranks. The group is a nationwide network of grass-roots activists dedicated to restoring constitutional, limited government – using the Internet as a way to make their concerns known to their representatives in Congress. For months it has been urging opposition to the trade agreement, which the committee maintains would cause irreparable harm to the independence of this country.

Rep. Paul, R-Texas, founder of the Liberty Committee, says he opposes the treaty because it undercuts and circumvents the Constitution.

“I oppose CAFTA for a very simple reason: It is unconstitutional. The Constitution clearly grants Congress alone the authority to regulate international trade. The plain text of Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 is incontrovertible. Neither Congress nor the president can give this authority away by treaty, any more than they can repeal the First Amendment by treaty. This fundamental point, based on the plain meaning of the Constitution, cannot be overstated. Every member of Congress who votes for CAFTA is voting to abdicate power to an international body in direct violation of the Constitution.”

Last week Snyder made the unusual move of letting the public know how each representative intends to vote on CAFTA before the bill comes to the floor. A tally showing the members’ intentions had been compiled by the print publication Congress Daily, which polled each representative. But since Congress Daily is not posted on the Internet, Snyder retyped the list and sent it out via the Internet to the thousands of Liberty Committee members.

An updated list was posted late yesterday on the committee’s website.

“I figured the public would like to know some of this inside information which they never get,” Snyder says. He has heard that the phones in the members’ offices have been ringing non-stop ever since.

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border=0> Mae Magouirk

Ora Mae Magouirk, the 81-year-old Georgia widow at the center of a contentious family fight over her medical treatment and right to live, died of a stroke today at approximately 8 a.m. Eastern, at a nursing home in LaGrange, Ga., according to her nephew, Ken Mullinax of Birmingham, Ala.

Mullinax told WorldNetDaily that his aunt’s condition had improved considerably since her ordeal last month, but took a turn for the worst Wednesday when her vital signs began to weaken. On Sunday an apparent stroke hit her, causing her to have difficulty with speaking, and her blood pressure dropped to 60/30.

She died surrounded by family, including her brother, A.B. McLeod, 65, of
Anniston, Ala., who had spent eight hours with her Sunday, Mullinax said.

Mullinax said his aunt responded well to treatment of her aortic dissection at the University of Alabama-Birmingham Medical Center in Birmingham, despite having been denied food and water from March 29-April 9.

When her condition was stabilized, the doctors who were treating her at the medical center recommended transferring her back to a hospital in LaGrange.

She continued recovering, and was eventually sent to the Bryan Nursing Home for convalescent treatment and rehabilitation. Members of the Oakside Baptist Church in LaGrange, which Magouirk attended – having learned of her earlier plight at the hospice from the media and her relatives in Alabama – kept Magourirk surrounded with love and companionship.

“Although she was cognizant, speaking, sitting up, eating/drinking and communicating until her last day alive, her family had decided not to tell her of the terrible ordeal she had endured at Hospice LaGrange until she was discharged from the nursing home. She was spared this final pain by God,” Mullinax said in a press statement.

In his statement Mullinax credited the friends of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, readers of WorldNetDaily, and talk show host Glenn Beck with saving his aunt from the death by starvation that had been instigated by her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, 41, of LaGrange.

“We, her closest living next of kin, her Alabama family, feel Mae was blessed to have died without being thirsty and having food in her stomach,” Mullinax stated. “We thank God for moving all the WorldNetDaily readers for their phone calls, prayers and active participation in saving her life.”

The funeral will be Wednesday, at Oakside Baptist Church.

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]]> http://www.wnd.com/2005/05/30349/feed/ 0 http://www.wnd.com/2005/04/29938/ http://www.wnd.com/2005/04/29938/#comments Wed, 20 Apr 2005 02:25:00 +0000 Sarah Foster http://wp.wnd.com/?p=29938

border=0> Mae Magouirk

Ora Mae Magouirk, the 81-year-old Georgia widow at the center of an intense
family dispute over her medical treatment and right to live, is growing
stronger every day, despite having been denied food and water for nearly two
weeks before being airlifted to the University of Alabama-Birmingham Medical
Center in Birmingham for treatment of an aortic dissection.

Her nephew, Ken Mullinax, 45, of Birmingham, told WorldNetDaily that
Magouirk is listed in stable condition, her vital signs are “very good,” her
blood pressure is normal, and the aortic dissection, the reason for her
hospitalization in the first place, is contained.

He said she smiles and laughs but speaks in whispers because of the nasal
feeding tube. The feeding tube saved her life, but Mullinax figures his aunt
is anxious to dispose of it in favor of more substantial nourishment.

He said he asked her, “What is the first real food you’d like, Aunt Mae?”

“And she whispered, ‘I want a really good chicken sandwich with lots of
mayonnaise.’”

And not just any kind of chicken sandwich, Mullinax explained. “It’s got to
be a fried chicken filet.”

“That was on Sunday,” he noted. “On Monday, she asked for ice cream.”

Mullinax said that although his aunt’s medical condition has greatly
improved, she is still exhausted and “as weak as a little newborn kitten” – not only from not having adequate nourishment or fluids, “but from the
morphine cocktail she was on for several weeks.”

Magourirk’s sister, Lonnie Ruth Mullinax, 74, of Birmingham, has been a
patient at UAB for the same condition, brought on, says her son, by the
stress she’s suffered worrying about her sister.

But when Magouirk was transferred to UAB on April 9 and began receiving food
and water, her sister’s medical condition improved dramatically and she was
scheduled to return home yesterday.

The two sisters visited several times this past week, and Ruth Mullinax says
she has noticed steady signs of improvement in her older sibling.

“She’s got a long ways to go because they kept food, water, everything away
from her for so many days,” Ruth Mullinax told WND. “But she is
communicating.”

“It’s such a miracle that she communicated with us,” she exclaimed. “Sister
knew who we [she and Ken] were. We asked her her name and she told us. And
she said she wanted ice cream. She communicated. The Lord has blessed us.”

As WorldNetDaily reported, Magouirk suffered an aortic dissection March
13, and was admitted to a hospital in LaGrange, Ga. Although Magouirk has a living will specifying fluids and nourishment should be withheld only if she were either comatose or “vegetative” – and she was neither – her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, 36, also of LaGrange, had Magouirk
moved to a hospice March 22. Also, upon Gaddy’s request, the hospice
withheld food and water from the patient.

When they learned of this, Magouirk’s immediate next of kin – Ruth Mullinax
and her brother, A.B. McLeod, 64, of Anniston, Ala. – attempted to have
their sister transferred from the hospice and to UAB Medical Center for
treatment.

But Gaddy obtained an emergency injunction from Troup County Probate Judge
Donald Boyd to prevent the planned air transport.

At a hearing April 4, Gaddy told Judge Boyd that since she held a
general power of attorney for her grandmother, she believed she was entitled
to make medical decisions on the older woman’s behalf. Boyd granted a
temporary guardianship to Gaddy and her brother, Michael Shane Magourirk,
but required that their grandmother be given adequate food and water.
Provisions were made for a possible transfer to UAB.

McLeod, Ruth and Ken Mullinax say Magouirk was not properly nourished, and
she was severely dehydrated when admitted to the UAB Medical Center on April
9.

Ruth Mullinax said until this recent incident involving her sister, she had “nothing but good things to say about hospice and I still do.”

She explained that her husband and his brother, her mother and grandmother
all died in their homes and hospice nurses came to help the family with
nursing chores.

“You can’t judge them all by the one [where Magouirk was placed],” observed
Mullinax. “But Lord Almighty, the day we walked in there, sister’s little
old tongue was just cracked open and there was just some ice chips sitting
there.”

That was April 4, following the hearing before Judge Boyd.

Lonnie Ruth met and talked with the doctor who had signed the forms
admitting Magourik to hospice.

“That doctor, the one that gave the release to put her in hospice, he acted
like Dr. Kavorkian to me,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Well, if she were
my mother, I’d put her in the hospice. She’s old, and she’s not going to get
well.”

“And I thought, ‘Well, bless your heart. You might be there yourself one
day.”

She said she was so upset by Magouirk’s condition and the way she was being treated
that she cried “all the way home” to Birmingham.

The rift with her sister’s granddaughter has hurt her deeply. She says she has no
idea why Gaddy decided to place Magouirk in a hospice with orders denying
her food and water.

“We were always so close, all of us,” she said sadly. “Real close. At least
I thought we were, but apparently we were not. Maybe she was led by this
doctor. I just don’t know.”

Nor does she understand why the younger woman apparently snubbed her
Monday.

Ken Mullinax was wheeling her to Magouirk’s room, just as Gaddy and another
granddaughter were leaving. He describes his cousin’s departure as “bolting
from the room.”

His mother found it perplexing.

“I love her. I still love her,” she says. “I don’t like what she did [to
Magouirk], but I love her. And as we were going into sister’s room, Beth and
her sister, Kim, were going out. I yelled at her, I said, ‘Beth, Beth,’ but
she didn’t turn around to acknowledge me or anything. They just continued to
walk.”

“I wasn’t going to be rude to them,” Ruth Mullinax continued. “I was just going
to hug their necks. I love them – I just don’t like what she did. I just
don’t understand it.”

Previous stories:

Happy ending for
‘grandma’?

Closest kin prevented from
visiting ‘grandma’

‘Grandma’ airlifted to
medical center

Georgia ‘Grandma’s life in
hands of 3 cardiologists

Granddaughter denies
feeding tube to grandma

]]> http://www.wnd.com/2005/04/29938/feed/ 0 http://www.wnd.com/2005/04/29852/ http://www.wnd.com/2005/04/29852/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2005 17:30:00 +0000 Sarah Foster http://wp.wnd.com/?p=29852

border=0> Mae Magouirk

It appears there will be a happy ending to the story of Ora Mae Magouirk, the 81-year-old Georgia widow whose family has been at loggerheads over her medical care, visitation privileges and whether she should be “allowed to die” but now is reaching agreements on key issues.

Today, attorneys on both sides agreed Magouirk’s brother and sister, A.B. McLeod, 64, of Anniston, Ala., and Lonnie Ruth Mullinax, 74, of Birmingham, will be allowed to visit their sister during regular visiting hours at the University of Alabama-Birmingham Medical Center in Birmingham, where she is receiving treatment for an aortic dissection.

Moreover, Jack Kirby, attorney for McLeod and Mullinax, told WorldNetDaily that under terms of the agreement, his clients will be allowed to talk directly to Magouirk’s doctors about her condition, as opposed to having such information “filtered through third parties.”

As reported by WND, when Magouirk was airlifted and admitted to UAB Medical Center on Saturday, her granddaughter and legal guardian, Beth Gaddy, 36, of LaGrange, Ga., left an oral order barring Magouirk’s siblings and her nephew, Ken Mullinax, 45, of Birmingham, from visiting the patient in the critical care unit.

Ruth Mullinax has been a patient at UAB for the same condition, brought on, says her son, by the stress she’s suffered worrying about her sister.

Kirby said he talked to Ruth Mullinax yesterday, and “she’s doing very well.” He did not comment on her sister’s condition.

However, relatives say it appears Magouirk is pulling through, despite her aortic dissection and the starvation and dehydration she endured from March 28 to April 9 at Hospice La-Grange, where she was placed by her granddaughter.

In her living will, Magouirk stated that fluids and nourishment were to be withheld only if she were either comatose or “vegetative,” and she is neither. Nor is she terminally ill, which is generally a requirement for admission to a hospice.

McLeod told WND the two women visited yesterday in Magouirk’s room, and “Ora Mae recognized [Ruth Mullinax] and they laughed and chatted briefly together.”

In an e-mail, Ken Mullinax provided further details of yesterday’s meeting, quoting remarks his mother, Ruth, made when he visited her at UAB early this morning.

“I visited with Sister Mae last evening, and she looks so much better now,” Ruth Mullinax said. “Mae opened her eyes and when she saw me said, ‘Where you been, Lonnie?’”

“I asked her how she felt and she whispered, ‘I can’t buck dance.’”

“So I stayed with her for 30 minutes, and when I got ready to leave she grabbed my hand and said, ‘Bring me a brown sack and take me home.’ That was a saying of Momma’s that means pack up my stuff. I am so thankful to the Lord that Sister is doing so well now.”

Ken Mullinax’s mother also told him she had spoken with the charge nurse and learned her sister is listed as being in stable condition. She has an IV in her arm for hydration and is being fed through a temporary nasal feeding tube, but she is cognizant. She speaks very softly because her throat is still very sore from the dehydration, he said.

The meeting between the sisters was arranged by an attorney in Birmingham and the UAB Medical Center that agreed late Wednesday to allow McLeod and Ruth Mullinax limited visits each day for humanitarian reasons. Under this arrangement, the siblings could visit their sister at 5:30 p.m. each day for half an hour.

Kirby then drafted motions to file with the probate court in LaGrange, asking the court to order Beth Gaddy to allow the visits.

McLeod said neither he nor nephew Ken Mullinax had done anything to cause problems at the hospital or hospice.

“We didn’t cause a scene, we didn’t cause anything in our sister’s room, and we think we ought to be able to see our sister,” McLeod said.

A second motion was to demand Gaddy “show cause” as to why she refused to allow her relatives to visit her grandmother and prohibited doctors from discussing the case with them.

Gaddy relaxed her position. She agreed to allow full visitation privileges, but only if Ken Mullinax promised never to talk to the media again or communicate in any way with Internet bloggers.

Mullinax refused and was on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” yesterday, where he provided a nationwide audience with details of the case. Hannity quoted from an exclusive story on WND, which was the first national news organization to investigate and report on the Magouirk case.

In another twist, Troup County Probate Judge Donald Boyd, who has had charge of the case since April 1, voluntarily recused himself.

Kirby told WorldNetDaily that Boyd gave no reason for his decision.

“There was no hearing,” Kirby said, “But I talked to the granddaughter’s attorney [Danny Daniel], and they have agreed to let my people visit without restriction with Mrs. Magouirk while she’s in the hospital, and they have agreed to allow my people to have access to information from the doctors regarding medical care and treatment.”

Kirby said that at first, they “allowed visitation of 30 minutes a day, and I told him we appreciated the gesture and we would observe our 30 minutes a day, but we still intended to go forward to ask the judge to give us more than that.”

After further discussions today, he continued, “they decided not to place any restrictions on visitation.”

Kirby added he would not pursue the “show cause” matter, if what he’d been told on the telephone is formalized in a court order.

Although McLeod and Ruth Mullinax have visitation privileges, Ken Mullinax does not.

Kirby said that has not been worked out yet.

“My immediate concern was for my two clients, the brother and sister of Mrs. Magouirk,” he said.

Kirby said he did not think there would be any restrictions in the long term and hopes the family dispute is near an end.

“I think this family is interested in healing their differences, and I think they’d like to stop airing them publicly and get back to being a family,” he said.

Previous stories:

Closest kin prevented from visiting ‘grandma’

‘Grandma’ airlifted to medical center

Georgia ‘Grandma’s’ life
in hands of 3 cardiologists

Granddaughter denies feeding tube to grandma