This will fuel fire to those that think hospitals kill people with brain damage but who are still alive for their organs.
I wonder how does organ donation work? I thought they had to ask permission of the next of kin?
They get around to the permission part eventually.
When I was a Patient Representative, I was in charge of getting permission from families for organ donation. Other than occasional eyes (mostly for research), the hospital had never before had any organ donations. My supervisor did not go over the process for other organs with me before I started, because she said they had never gotten another organ. That changed my very first day on the job (I worked weekends, so my supervisor was an hour away at home).
The night before my shift started on Sat morning, a young man came in with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The doctor declared him brain dead. The doctor then spoke to the family and told them that they needed to make a decision about unplugging him from the machines and that he would be back shortly. He then talked to me and said that I needed to ask about organ donation because that needed to be arranged before the plug was pulled. He made sure to iterate that there was to be no pressure and that if the family said 'no', then we were to respect that and move on.
We approached the family, and as soon as we mentioned 'organs', the family interrupted us and said that they had been discussing it and that they would like to donate his entire body, in hopes that something good could come from their tragedy. We were floored.
I then contacted the two donation agencies (one for the eyes, one for the rest of the body). They came from Atlanta (about 1 1/2 hrs away) and brought their own doctors, etc. (And I called my boss, who spent her Saturday on the phone with me, helping me with the mounds of paperwork that no one had ever waded through before at that hospital).
A month or two later, I received a letter from the agency that took his organs. It detailed all the people who now can live longer lives because of the generosity of this one family, this one person's body. The man who got the heart, the mother who got a kidney, the young man who got the other kidney, the woman who got the liver. The list went on and on. I sat there and cried, re-reading the letter over and over.
Being afraid before to list myself as an organ donor on my license, I changed my mind that day and have been listed since then as an organ donor. No, I don't believe that hospitals let people die to get their organs (like I had been led to believe). Nor to paramedics on the side of the road think more about the organs than they do the life in their hands, that they have been trained to save. The hospitals don't get the organs anyway; they contact a different agency. And the organs go to people on a national list, in order of need.
My friend who I discussed earlier - who was brain dead and her husband decided early to have her unplugged from the machines? She needed a liver transplant from Hep C. She didn't get one in time.
Anyway, I just wanted to share my experience with the whole organ donation process.
(ETA - Prior to that, in college, I worked for a heart transplant surgeon. I watched firsthand as the doctors prepared periodically for a transplant because a heart had been located. I was actually allowed to sit in the observation booth for the first heart-lung transplant that they had ever performed. And it was made possible by a young man in an motorcycle wreck who was then declared brain dead as the hospital. His family chose to donate his organs, and I saw this lucky recipient get the heart and lungs. She is still alive today, and this was 25 yrs ago. Organ donors really matter. I wonder if Jahi's mom has considered donation as a way for her daughter to live on and give life to others?)
