(LifeNews.com) - Imagine lying in a hospital bed and being asked: “Do you want to live?” Now imagine this: your answer doesn’t matter. Chris Dunn doesn’t have to imagine this, because he’s living it from a bed at Houston Methodist Hospital. Chris, a 46 year old former EMT, has been in the Houston hospital for more than eight weeks because he collapsed, likely due to a mass on his pancreas. While Chris breathes with assistance from a ventilator, he is conscious and alert.

His mother, Evelyn Kelly, is Chris’s Medical Power of Attorney. She has had to fight for Chris’s continued care because Houston Methodist has invoked a statutory process, found in the Texas Advanced Directives Act, which allows the hospital to override medical directives of a patient and provide only ten days’ notice before withdrawing life-sustaining treatment. And this is coming from a hospital explicitly claiming to be Christian, which proclaims they “strive to treat everyone as a person of sacred worth and value, created by God.” CONTINUE