Brain Death and the Organ Donor Conspiracy

Originally posted by new_here
Oh my dear sister Linda, I love you so much and I hope you didn't suffer. I told them you squeezed my hand- just a little. Barely noticeable. They said something about involuntary reflex or something. I said (or did I just scream it in my head?) if there's involuntary reflex, then there's signal, then there's brain activity!

It was not my decision to take you off life support, but that is no excuse for not fighting for you. You squeezed MY hand (I think) and so you called out to ME to help you. God help me, I let your husband and the "experts" decide to pull the plug.

Did your heart-rate not fluctuate for a couple of minutes? Is that not a sign of signals attempting to keep it going? If no signals from the brain, would it not just stop immediately?

I am so sorry they did not have to take me out kicking and screaming and restrain me. I am so sorry I did not fight for you. Ten years out, yet it still plagues me to this day.

OP: You are not responsible for my feelings by bringing up this topic. Thank you for giving my grief a voice.

edit on 9/18/2012 by new_here because: (no reason given)

Exact same situation happened to my sister/best friend Laureen. I removed myself from the donors list a decade ago. I too felt victimized by "donor team". I hope her organs saved someone else's life.
brice

This absolutely kills me inside. My 15 year old daughter overdosed on prescription medication she took. She came out on a Saturday evening and was perfectly fine and told everyone she loved them and goodnight. Sunday morning when we went to wake her to go to church she was unresponsive, not breathing, apparently deceased. She had a temperature of 104 when the paramedics and police arrived. They took her to the hospital emergency room and homicide showed up and we were all dealing with them for about 30 minutes before we were able to go to the hospital.

When I got there a nurse told me she was deceased and would I sign a release for organ donation. I was very distraught and not in my right mind obviously. Believing that they would be telling me the truth and considering my daughter's always willing to help others we thought that she would want us to use her organs to help save some other child’s life and I signed the papers.

I was later very disturbed to find out what exactly they did and really don't want to discuss it here. However, I found out she was supposedly being kept alive on a respirator. Considering she had a temperature of 104 when the paramedics arrived and they rushed her to the hospital, she had to be alive in order for them to use the organs. They supposedly have to be alive or the organs would be quickly destroyed.

I received a letter several weeks later which informed me that for some reason they were unable to use anything they harvested (their word) from her. That was just that much worse because I can't get this mutilation out of my mind. They took not only organs, but bones, tissue, etc. Try living with that on your mind and also knowing that it was all for naught.

I am now horrified at what they did to her and can't get it out of my head that exactly what this thread is about happened to my daughter. I can barely continue living with myself as I signed the authorization. I can't tell you all the things that run through my mind and if I didn't have such a strong family and their support, you would probably have read about me in the news by now. I would seriously give great consideration and discussion amongst your families about the possibility of having a similar situation develop with one of your loved ones and being confronted with an overzealous medical person asking for a signature because there is nothing that can be done to save your loved one.

I once accidentally overdosed on pain medicine which I had been given increasingly potent form of over 22 years. I was on life support for several days and my family was told I had no brain activity and they didn't think I would recover from it. Well, the doctors, and my family were shocked when I pulled the respirator hose out of my throat twice before waking up and immediately being conscious and talking. They said they had never seen someone come out of it like that. The doctors told the family that if I did come out it would take several days and I may not be able to speak or have any real ability to function normally. I am telling you this for one reason. The doctors do not know for sure what the hell is going to happen. This happening over the same narcotic pain medicine that my daughter took further convinced me that had I not signed the organ donation papers that she may have had a full recovery.

Please, take serious consideration before you make any decision like that and discuss it with your family and with medical professionals that have no personal interest in a potential situation like that. I would have made a totally different decision and living with something like that decision is a nightmare!

I am an extern in a cardiac critical care ICU. Most of our patients are in a fine line somewhere between life and death. Any time a patient is deteriorating and all the measures to save their life are not working, it is time to talk to the family about discontinuing life support and letting nature take its course. Most families don't want their loved ones to suffer any more than they already have, although there are those that believe than any and all means to sustain their loved ones is the only choice and keep them on ventilators and every heart drug imaginable. Eventually those drugs wont work anymore to sustain the heart, and because the body is going through multiple organ failure, they will eventually become severely septic. What quality of life is it for anyone to have if they have a signal going to their cerebrum and they can momentarily respond to a stimulus but they have massive infection and they can't pump blood anymore and the kidneys can't excrete urine and they are in severe pain? None. It is usually the nurse that is watching the patient and supporting the family at the end, and I have yet to see a doctor involved in this situation if they are a DNR. Furthermore, hospital policy forbids anyone working for the hospital to say a word about organ donation until after the patient has passed, and respectfully will abide by the significant other's wishes. So although someone is making a case for this being a big conspiracy, I am witnessing this first hand and I can honestly tell you it's not happened in our hospital.

Great thread man

reply to post by smyleegrl


I am more shocked that people are waking up to this now. Reason why I changed from being an organ donor to not an organ donor because my definition of brain dead is different then most state governments(machines cannot keep you alive if your body gives out). Just write a private will dictating under what circumstances you are willing to donate organs,

reply to post by loam


True money is a factor, it speeds the process up a little, but in the end your MELD score is what determines if you get a transplant or not.

reply to post by smyleegrl


I think the problem is what they use to determine end of life, we see many cases where people 'die' only to come back later. The main problem is the brain and body is a amazing thing, and given the right circumstances will fool the best of us.

reply to post by sugarcookie1


Wow, double lung, thats a tough one. Hopefully you will get your gift soon.

Being on the receiving end of all of this you get a prospective that the general population will never understand.
I have always been a donor, ever since i was able to drive, my license was marked.
I would want them to use what ever they could to help someone else. No point in letting things go to waste.

I will keep you in my thoughts sugarcookie1.

reply to post by Happy1


Boise MT? ? ? Where is that? I know of Bozeman and Butte and other big cities, but dont know of any
places such as Boise. For MT the transplant centers are mostly Seattle and Salt Lake and Denver.


You must mean Boise ID. Its the only place i can think of big enough that would have a hospital large enough for transplants.

reply to post by Hr2burn


The decision for knowing the family of the donor is up to the family. A patient is not allowed information about who donated and where they are ect. I know for liver, you have to wait a year after your transplant, then if you want to contact the donor family you are allowed to write a letter with no specific information, which your transplant team will forward to the donor family.
It is totally up to the donor family if they respond or contact back, through the transplant team. There is no direct contact between the donor and the receiver for quite a while and it has to be initiated by the donor family.

reply to post by smyleegrl


Did you know that they can make over £400.000 off a healthy donor
big money isnt it

Im thinking of unregistering

reply to post by Happy1


Wow, i am going to do some checking on that... that is just crazy, even being brain dead you would think they would use common sence and decency.
I'll have to do some checking up the line, i hope this is not true, would defiantly put a different light on things.

I know this doesn't fall under the "Brain Death" category but I have a personal Organ Donor experience.

In 2010 I was in a horrible motorcycle crash with a whole host of injuries that are well quite exhausting to type out all of them.

Among my injuries were 3 arterial tares around my heart including at least one tear to my aorta.
Later I was told that at least one of the tares actually dissected.
The thing is due to the nature of my injuries they couldn't actually open me up to operate as my ribs and skin were the only things keeping pressure on the bleeding.
So they sand bagged me.
They packed sand bags on my chest to slow the bleeding, not to save my life but to keep me alive just long enough.

I also had damage to all of my internal organs, the damage wasn't so bad that they couldn't use the organs individually.
The problem was having them all damaged at the same time, including all of my connective tissue.
All of the mesentery, and other connective tissues holding my organs in place dissolved on impact(I knew it could be damaged but "dissolved" that was a shocker)
So basically as a whole entity I was shutting down.

I was also in a coma, not a brain dead coma more like my brain was off to protect itself.

So here I was coma, all my organs are bruised damaged and beaten, I am bleeding into my chest cavity from tares to my arteries.
The doctor was explaining to Ma that I was dying.

Ma loves me, so she is pissed.
She hauls off and hits me upside the head.
The doctor tells her to stop that/she can't do that as I am dying and speeding the process along isn't a good thing.
Ma says something along the lines of "oh yeah watch me".
She smacks me in the head again again(I'm guessing harder).
The doctor says my vitals instantly took a turn for the better and I began to stabilize.
I came out of the coma for a short while with the doctor still in the room and begged him to hide me from Ma and don't tell her I'm in the hospital.
I had no idea she was in the room.
I actually repeated this every time my memory reset with my friends.
I would come to ask them not to tell Ma, they would point to the side where she was.
I would beg for mercy and my memory would reset.

The doctors don't know how I lived, and they don't even know how my multiple artery tears were able to stabilize themselves and repair themselves.
Apart from the necessary surgeries they don't know how my body stitched itself together and healed.

The doctors would joke about asking Ma to visit the coma section of the ICU if she was in the room, and Ma would say no it wouldn't be right to hit other peoples family members.
The funny thing, Ma used to work the coma ward back when they kept large coma wards in hospitals.
It didn't matter if she was on the day shift or graveyard, she had close to 30% more patients wake up during her shift.
At one time she said she had patients waking up more than once a week.

As far as organ transplants go, when I'm dead if my body can benefit someone else I'm fine with that.
But I really want the doctors to be sure I'm dead before they start carving me up like a turkey.

Just imagine if Ma had been out of state, my license says I'm a donor.
Who knows what would have happened if Ma hadn't been their to smack some sense into me.

Originally posted by justsaying
I am an extern in a cardiac critical care ICU. Most of our patients are in a fine line somewhere between life and death. Any time a patient is deteriorating and all the measures to save their life are not working, it is time to talk to the family about discontinuing life support and letting nature take its course. Most families don't want their loved ones to suffer any more than they already have, although there are those that believe than any and all means to sustain their loved ones is the only choice and keep them on ventilators and every heart drug imaginable. Eventually those drugs wont work anymore to sustain the heart, and because the body is going through multiple organ failure, they will eventually become severely septic. What quality of life is it for anyone to have if they have a signal going to their cerebrum and they can momentarily respond to a stimulus but they have massive infection and they can't pump blood anymore and the kidneys can't excrete urine and they are in severe pain? None. It is usually the nurse that is watching the patient and supporting the family at the end, and I have yet to see a doctor involved in this situation if they are a DNR. Furthermore, hospital policy forbids anyone working for the hospital to say a word about organ donation until after the patient has passed, and respectfully will abide by the significant other's wishes. So although someone is making a case for this being a big conspiracy, I am witnessing this first hand and I can honestly tell you it's not happened in our hospital.

Thanks for replying. Its wonderful to have a doctor's viewpoint.

I do have a question. In the book I read, it stated that someone could be pronounced dead, but still be hooked up to life support. They called this a "beating heart cadaver." The reason cited for keeping the person on life support was to keep the organs viable until harvest. In your experience, is this a generally accepted practice? Or does it vary by hospital or state?

*has organs donated to five subjects*

*soul is splintered between 5 vassals*

*VOLDEMORT MINIONS!!!!!*

reply to post by spirit_horse


Wow, thanks so much for sharing your story. You are a strong person to be able to share that with all of ATS. Hopefully, your story can help others who may be faced with the same decision in the future.

Keep your head up, and never blame yourself for the death of another. We can never know what could have been, only what has happened and everything happens for a reason. One day you will reunite with your daughter and everything will be understood. For now, she is with you in thought and prayer.

reply to post by severdsoul

Originally posted by severdsoul
True money is a factor, it speeds the process up a little, but in the end your MELD score is what determines if you get a transplant or not.

Not outside the system, where you can repeatedly obtain organs, if necessary.

Read some of the material in my thread.

BODY SNATCHERS: The illegal organ harvest trade...Its BIGGER than you think.

___________________

On this thread specifically, I have to say reading the personal stories on ALL sides is heartbreaking. Maybe one of the most disturbing threads I've read on these boards in a really long time.

reply to post by Pigraphia


That is the most bizarre personal experience I have ever read.

Thanks for sharing it.

Don't wanna read this because I was in the room when they determine my grandfather brain dead and pull the plug. Yet somehow it seemed he was still with us.

Found this article from the NIH, trying to find info on Pa laws after what the previous poster said. I understand having a statewide common denominator to verify brain death, but a law that says "he's dead, unplug the end"?

Doesn't the family have a choice to keep them on machines if they choose? I guess it all comes down to the money.

he legal definition of brain death may vary between different institutions and states [11,28]. At the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, brain death confirmation is basically defined by the three protocols mentioned previously.

The third method, that of using a cerebral blood flow scan (a technique which was previously ordered rather infrequently at our institution) in conjunction with only one brain death examination, dramatically shortens brain death stay. Therefore, we are currently using this method in order to minimize brain death stay and maximize organ procurement possibilities; nuclear medicine scans can be performed quite expeditiously at our institution. In most cases, the criteria for brain death determination by nuclear scan are clear cut, allowing a decision to be made without equivocation.

The brain scan technique, as previously described, is noninvasive, usually requiring only a venous access line to adminster the radio tracer [34]. There are no known side-effects of such preparations and therefore organs of interest for transplantation, such as the kidney, liver, heart, lungs and pancreas, are not affected by performing this type of examination. The results of the scan are available within 30 min of radio tracer injection and the technique can be performed at the bedside with portable nuclear medicine cameras, although these are currently unavailable at our institution [27].

While cerebral arteriography can be used for the same purposes, it is generally more costly and time consuming than the nuclear scan [30,32]. Overall, the nuclear scan leads to a decrease in associated charges and is safe, fast and accurate [31]. It has become the method of choice to determine brain death in our trauma population.