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Just wondering how many organ harvesting operations have you been involved with. Because your comment is incredibly inaccurate.

Having worked at a hospital where this was done, I can assure you that even with a donor card, the family is deeply involved. Now, that means the next of kin. I am sure there are cases where the spouse has one opinion and a sibling or parent has another.

And this stuff takes time. There are several teams involved. They don’t start hacking at the body. They are not ghouls who “get off” on this.

If you don’t approve of harvesting, that’s fine. But it is heavily regulated, incredibly respectful, and involves dozens of professionals.

“If you don’t approve of harvesting, that’s fine.”

I do approve! If it’s done ethically. (I basically don’t trust the ethics of almost anybody any more, especially in healthcare, since March 2020.)

I always found the people who represent the Organ Bank to be extraordinarily serene, patient, congenial.

Sometimes their ‘requests’ seemed annoying and unreasonable. Example, they wanted intubated patients to be on Room Air (21% O2) with no PEEP, and to maintain a Sat of 100% which though not impossible is challenging to attain. One has to tweak the respiratory rate and/or volumes/pressures. The Apnea tests I always disliked and I avoided them because of the usual ‘official finality’ of the outcomes. I was required to do a few over the years, but I did not like them. Not difficult, just unsettling.

Anecdote, once I took a young healthy looking man (30s) to a brain scan. They can take a while 1-2 hours even. I brought the patient back to the ICU and while I documented I saw that the Patient was declared expired WHILE WE WERE IN THE ELEVATOR.They declared him dead by computer. I am positive that was inappropriate. I hated going to those scans.

The let me bring him back to the room put him back on the regular vent and the family was called into a conference room. I walked by that room and I heard loud screams. that was actually just before I commenced my documentation. I was upset about that, but I am unable to explain exactly why.

All in all it was a different sort of Christmas week for that family.