(National Donate Life Month brought back to mind my concerns about organ donation, so I re-post what I wrote last year.)
Sounds so altruistic… why would anyone want to deprive someone whose life is being shortened by the bad condition of their own organs, if we can become organ donors just by checking a box in our driver’s license? After all, if I were to make such a decision, my organs would only be removed after I died, so I wouldn’t feel the pain, suffer in the least, and my family would live with the knowledge that in my death I was able to extend someone else’s life, right?
What a noble thought, and, considering the shortage of viable organs for such donations, how poignant that we don’t have many more making such a sublime gift.
I used to think this way. But, lately, I have discovered that I, like the public at large, have been completely misinformed as to what really goes on when organs are donated.
On the one hand, I, the donor, may not necessarily be a dead, non-breathing, cadaver… I, the donor, may actually look like a body that is asleep, and have a ticking heart. On the other hand, I, the donor, may be a corpse that, through the marvels of science, can be made to look like I am coming back from the dead, giving false hopes to my family.
If I check out that little box in the driver’s license to be an organ donor and I end up in a hospital declared brain dead or any sort of dead, I am at the mercy of the hospital and doctors, who will decide when to declare me dead, and when and how to extract all my organs. That’s fine and dandy if hospital staff and doctors have the same approach to life and death that I do.
But, what if they don’t value life or see life in the same light as I do? What if they start seeing me as just a convenient pod, from which to harvest a very lucrative set of commodities? There lies the rub.
Based on what you report, and from my own experience, it is the family or those “legally” responsible for the patient who can make a life/death difference for the potential organ donor, unless the donor has ticked the “organ donor” section in the driver’s license.
I never gave all this any thought until I witnessed it first-hand, and realized how important it is to have loved ones be the ones to decide what to do with one’s body.
My sister worked in a hospital where they did a lot of organ transplants. Trauma victims are supposed to be kept dry so brain swelling will decrease; cannot get an accurate EEG with an edematous brain.
Since these patients were being perceived as donors, they kept the organs well hydrated, so people who could have been saved were instead having their organs harvested.
My sister said some families who insisted that their loved ones be saved actually had these patients, in time, walk out of the hospital, instead of being sent to the morgue.