Mar. 11, 01:00 EDT
Father shunned by family for defying faith to save child.
Carol Harrington
CANADIAN PRESS
CALGARY — Shunned by the Jehovah's Witnesses he once embraced, he's a now lonely man, ignored by family and friends as if he were a wandering ghost.
He's been "lost" for almost a month, since defying his faith by agreeing to blood transfusions for his 16-year-old leukemia-stricken daughter.
The 51-year-old Calgary father, who cannot be named under laws protecting her identity, knew he would pay a high price. Even the girl whose life might be saved by his decision sometimes says she hates him.
"I was under tremendous pressure," he said in a recent interview. "Because I knew that if I went against what the church taught, that I would be excommunicated and no Jehovah's Witness would ever speak to me again, including my family."
His wife now comes home only to do laundry. His other two daughters, 14 and 22, want little to do with him.
They have banned him from his daughter's hospital room when Witness meetings are piped in over the speaker phone. Meetings occur several times a week and some last all day.
He goes to work at an architectural firm but is ignored by friends.
"It's as though I don't exist."
Any Jehovah's Witness who challenges such tenets as that against blood transfusions, which they believe is set out in several Bible passages, is shunned.
"When I made the decision with a clear conscience, I went into my daughter's hospital room. My whole family was there, and I told them about my decision, saying: `No matter what happens with this case, I still love you, each and every one of you.'
"And their reply, each of them, was: `We hate you and we'll never speak to you again'."
Doctors say the best available treatment to combat the potentially fatal disease is blood transfusions and chemotherapy. His daughter has received those treatments several times over at Alberta Children's Hospital.
According to the girl's lawyer, when she is taken to the operating room for a transfusion, she uses what little strength she has to resist.
"They semi-sedate her, hold her down on the bed and they give the blood transfusion," said David Gnam, whose Ontario law firm in Georgetown, works primarily for the Jehovah's Witnesses. "She's not trying to die. She would like treatment that would respect her wishes."
In mid-February, she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia after going to hospital for what she thought was a throat infection.
A pediatrician told the family that there is a 40 per cent to 50 per cent survival rate with blood transfusions and a 65 per cent chance with a bone marrow transplant. They rejected the suggested treatment, saying they were Jehovah's Witnesses.
Then the father reopened his Bible to Acts 15:28, a passage Witnesses cite for refusing blood transfusions. Over and over, he read:
"For the Holy Spirit and we ourselves, ask a favour adding no further burden to you except these necessary things: to abstain from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from the things strangled and from fornication. If you carefully keep yourselves from these things, you will prosper. Good health to you."
The words he had read hundreds of times since becoming a Witness 20 years ago in Ontario in Belleville and accepted: no heavenly paradise for those who accept another's blood.
"I was struggling with those scriptures and reading others that talk a great deal about the sanctity of life, how important life is."
Finally, he concluded it would be wrong, even cruel, to watch his daughter die without trying to save her.
Had she agreed to transfusion, she too would be disowned by her mother and sisters. "She's lived such an isolated, controlled life — all her friends are Jehovah's Witnesses."
He talks to his daughter each day by phone. Sometimes she gets angry, telling him: "I hate you."
Then there are kinder, gentler moments when she says the opposite.