If she was smoked up on coke and fen why would anyone want organs from a carcass like that? I’m not quite believing either half of the story. Now they say brain damage but before they said smoke inhalation. One could lead to the other, I guess, but it would be refreshing to hear an accurate account of the circumstance——could actually help someone else.
Her lungs were so damaged by inhaling hot toxic smoke that they no longer passed oxygen into the bloodstream, and the lack of oxygen caused brain damage.
That’s what I was thinking. With her chronic substance abuse how would her organs be viable and who’d want them?
All that stuff metabolizes in your system pretty fast. It’s no different than the meds they give a non-drug user to manage their pain until they harvest their organs.
You “guess”?
Or you could do a bit of research before making (I won’t say) comments.
To cover the various bases:
Long term organ damage from drugs / drinking is certainly a concern when it comes to organ donation. (The organs could be still be donated to “science” if the family was willing or if Ms. Heche had signed off on that previously.)
Most substances along the lines of drugs or alcohol in Ms. Heche’s system would have been metabolized fairly quickly. That would including strong pain killers she may have received at the hospital.
As for smoke and / or heated air inhalation, it can cause severe lung inflammation that just gets worse, the lungs gunk up and one essentially has critical pneumonia: Oxygen levels drop too low even with intubation, and organs, esp. the brain, start dying. In extreme cases of course death is quick, but, very often the burn victim hangs on, lungs declining, for a time. I can only hope for Ms. Heche that she went unconscious or was put into a coma early on.