Awake!, “He ‘Remembered His Creator in the Days of His Youth’”

Awake!, “He ‘Remembered His Creator in the Days of His Youth’”

22 May 1994 · pp.3-8 · Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.

“I just could not live with myself if I am given blood.”

The article, narrated by his father, describes Adrian Yeatts of Newfoundland, Canada, aged 14, diagnosed with a fast-growing abdominal lymphoma in March 1993 and subsequently leukaemia. Newfoundland’s Supreme Court (Justice Robert Wells) held in July 1993 that he was a mature minor whose refusal of blood would be respected. He was baptised in a hospital physiotherapy tank on 12 September 1993 and the article records that he died the next day. A boxed item describes a bloodless heart transplant for three-year-old the three-year-old in Ohio of Ohio in October 1993, reported a month later as doing well. The article also records the medical advice as the family reported it: Dr Jardine 'explained that a very aggressive chemotherapy program with blood transfusions was the only way Adrian could possibly live'; 'chemotherapy was started, without the transfusions'; and it closes by saying that he rejected transfusions 'that could conceivably have extended his present life'.

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