Posted on 11/21/2007 9:47:38 AM PST by Tulsa Ramjet
OKLAHOMA CITY -- What may have been a mistake at a Texas hospital is being called a miracle by the parents of a Frederick man who was critically injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident.
For more than six hours on Monday, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol classified Zack Dunlap as the state's 610th motor vehicle fatality of the year.
Troopers removed Dunlap's name from the list the same day after learning he showed signs of life shortly before his organs were to be harvested for transplant.
Dunlap was hurt about 7:30 p.m. on Saturday while riding his four-wheeler on a Tillman County road less than a mile west of Davidson with a friend. His vehicle hit the rear of Colton Gains' four-wheeler, causing Dunlap's ATV to spin 180 degrees and throwing him off, according to the patrol's report.
Dunlap, 21, was flown to United Regional Healthcare System in Wichita Falls, Texas, where he was placed on life support.
Doctors pronounced him dead at 11:10 a.m. Monday, said trooper Betsy Randolph, a patrol spokeswoman.
However, "He's alive," Randolph said after speaking with hospital officials late Monday.
As a worker was removing tubes from Dunlap's body in preparation for medical personnel to remove his organs, Dunlap reached out and touched a nurse's arm, Randolph said.
(Excerpt) Read more at tulsaworld.com ...
“because a doctor was in a hurry to harvest his organs.”
There is no way to tell that from the information in the article.
I don’t know why everyone has this idea that ER docs are hanging out waiting for organs to come available. In 23 years, I have never seen a doctor that was happy about the prospect of harvesting organs. I have transported hundreds that were destined to become organ donors, and have never seen a doctor fail to do everything they could to save a patient. Never.
We can keep people alive on life support, which allows time for tests to determine whether there is brain activity. So the idea of rushing to harvest organs is just silly. The rush comes on the other side of organ donation, after the organ has been harvested. There is a very limited time available between harvesting and transplant, so the harvested organ is often rushed to the recipient, and the recipient is often rushed to the hospital for surgery.
I don’t know what happened in this case, because there isn’t enough information available to tell. But to equate a transplant doctor with a doctor that euthanizes patients or provides abortion is horribly wrong.
“I’m a 46 year old woman and things just don’t hang out in the same places they once did if you get my drift.”
Aww don’t be down on yourself.....got any pics? (ha ha just kidding)
Do some of you really think that most doctors are ghoulishly waiting in the shadows just waiting to rip the organs out of a still living human being?...Besides, most doctors I’ve known see the death of their patient as a personal defeat and they are much more apt to err on the side of life.
___________________________
I do think this: if the doctors thought the patient had a chance for a “significant” recovery, all of them would fight to save that patient.
But there are doctors out there, who when they think the patient will at best survive with major cognitive impairments, think it would be better for the patient, the family, health care workers and society for the patient to die.
That doesn’t mean that they would not carry out the family’s wishes despite their own beliefs, and there are protocols that are supposed to prevent the “better off dead” approach against the family’s wishes. Until it gets to the “futile care” level and the ethics committee gets involved - but that has nothing to do with organ donation.
But there are many, many doctors and nurses who ask “What kind of life is it? What quality of life is there or is there going to be?” and wish the family would just let go. That some of them pressure or manipulate the family is not unheard of.
Problem is, the organ "harvesters" would never tell you if they'd acted too hastily.
You know the old saying: Doctors bury their mistakes.
I think you misread me. Most doctors are OK, but some are better than others, and there are a few bad apples in any profession. I’ve run into a few incompetent doctors in my lifetime, and also had some who were extraordinarily good.
I don’t fault this doctor. He was probably going by the book. I don’t expect that he was hurrying to harvest the organs on purpose. I’m just saying that it adds some risk and some complication.
YUP per what I’m told.
ping to murron for post #60
Little is known by American medicine of the stasis between body and mind, when a person hovers between life and death. Many know it as purgatory, others as the "bardo" or "pardo." SOmetimes it is just not time for us to die, and karma or psychic events or God call the body BACK to life.
Until Western medicine knows more about this inbetween state, the state that exists between life and death, they have no business hauling out a corpses innards. It is a fact that the human hearing sense can go on for up to 2 days after death, and the brain can register sounds, long after the body has died, and the rest of the human sense processes have dissolved.
The human spirit for some people may linger for a long time in the body.
I will never consent to organ donation for these reasons. It can put a dying person into a very confused state and on the road straight to hell.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead , in which a liturgy is read to help the person who is passing away, as the senses dissolve upon death. Since hearing is the sense that continues, a dying person can hear what is being read to him or her: a manual on literally how to die properly. IN this the various stages of death are addressed, they were known and defined a long time before Western science happened. Yogis could place there bodies and mind into this stae and then returned to life to teach about it, which is how this knowledge was accumulated.
It is why I am so against Organ Donation, because it causes immense suffering in those involved as subjects, because it interferes with the peaceful process of death and spiritual departure:
http://www.summum.us/mummification/tbotd/
For those less esoterically inclined, there is a shorter description of the Tibetan Book of the Dead ( The Heard Liberation which Occurs Upon Entering the Bardo, or Bardo Thodal):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo_Thodol
Organ Donation may be a blessing to the donee, but is a curse upon the donor.One must not do it lightly for it is more of a sacrifice than we can possibly imagine.
My apologies. thank you for making the correction for me.
If there is cardiac death, the organs are unusable. Only brain death can be used to declare someone eligible for organ donation. There is no time limit for CPR, and it is a doctor’s call when to stop. I assure you that organ harvesting is NEVER a consideration when calling death, because once CPR is stopped the organs become unusable. You are mistaken.
“But apparently that doesn’t stop the “experts” here from spewing dishonest statements and believing them as truths.”
Thanks for the reinforcement. It is unbelievable and the crazies just keep crawling out of the woodwork. IMO most of them are just making this up to create controversy, because their facts do not even resemble to truth.
I wonder if it ever occurs to them that people could actually die because of what they are doing? Like the guy who said all his medical friends say that ER docs don’t even bother with resuscitation because they make so much money doing transplants. There should be a way to notify other posters that they are known to make things up.
“Your “people who work in the medical field” are telling you stories or you are telling stories yourself.”
First of all, I don’t appreciate being called a liar. I have been posting on Free Republic a long time and I don’t post false or erroneous information. If you have a disagreement with what I say, that’s one thing. But don’t impugn my integrity.
Second, to all those who think that the medical profession is above any sort of chicanery just don’t know the full story. There has been a slippery slope going on for quite a while. I have been involved with issues of life for more than 20 years, and abortion is only the tip of the iceberg. Just like with any field, there are your good and your bad. The good ones are labelled as “crazies” or “liars” and that is supposed to shut them up. These people I know are the good ones. They are on the front lines as well, and they have confirmed that this does happen. Why don’t they report it? Because they would be labelled liars, just as was done here. The original story that started this discussion should be enough of an eye-opener. People who are in car accidents are not given the opportunity to recover if the families sign over the organs. As far as the organ donor workers not being affiliated with the hospitals, the hospitals know they are there. They wouldn’t be allowed to do what they do and harass families who are grieving into signing over the organs if they didn’t have the hospitals’ blessings. Within 24 hours of an accident, these people with their clipboards are already manning their posts and asking the families for the organs. They wouldn’t know who to ask if the doctors didn’t inform them of who was “brain dead”. 24 hours is certainly not enough time to determine if the person is going to come out of their comas. If this was happening after the person had been in a coma for a while, say a year, then you may agree that the person has no reasonable hope of recovery. But 24 hours is not enough time.
I was wondering when some-one would post this clasic...
> This is the reason why I will not succumb to the liberal socialist harvesting of human body parts process,becuase once you sign that organ donors card, you are on a roll, and they can miss the spark of life.
Here’s another reason. My friend, an EMT, told me not to sign the card. Why? Because if you are found unconscious and it looks like you are dying and do not have an organ donor card on you, then they have to keep up life saving efforts twice as long as required for someone with a signed organ donor card.
Well I am an RN for the past 22 years and I’m telling you the “pushiness” for a quick organ donation does occur! Some of the younger RN’s have been especially indoctrinated into the quicky “your young (brain bleed accident you pick the insult) victim has no hope” syndrome and are on the phone to Lifenet(Central Va’s organ donor quasi NGO) to get the whole ball going only to discover that the patient starts responding and the donation ends up not happening!
Yes there are protocols in place but mostly for detirmination of brain death or non survivable catastrophic
injury so that cardio vascular support of the “living cadaver” can be maintained until the vivisectors arrive.
I am not against the notion of donation, I am against a system of thought and practices that “hurries” the families along with-out the full detirmination of the patient’s present status and prospects for rehab!
I have seen patients who have had major insults in their brains stroll back through our units thanking those who had given them care. Some will always have some lingering memory or physical deficits, but 99% have gone on to resume useful lives.
These times scare me!
While such a safeguard might protect us, you have failed to explain how such a safeguard would prevent the premature harvesting of organs from Democrats.
See my post at 117! I am a current RN and I do know there can be such pushiness to get a patient into the organ donation system faster than what is warranted. There are those whom I’ve privately labeled, “the donation true beleievers”, who were quick to get on the phone with the Organisation that co-ordinates donations.
There were recent changes in Va law with regards to what had to be done in the cases of impending demise and the Roles RN’s had to play. This young Harpy type came down to
“explain” to us that we had so much time to report a death and so much time to report when a patient had reached a Glascow Coma Scale of 4 and could not breathe with out a vent...practically threatening our licenses “under the law” ect! We were also told that we were not to tell the families of these patients of the calls made to this organization...that they would “handle it”!
She didn’t appreciate it when I asked if her organization was the only state sanctioned organiztion that did this in the state and who ran it and where did the money go. She also didn’t like it when I queried if the state regs and this organization were all properly vetted under HIPPA Federal privacy laws and were RN’s going to be protected should privacy suits be instituted. She had attempted to “delphi” me but she was rather demonsrtative of her irritation with me and since the folks I work with know that I don’t become pointed in my questioning with out cause, she finished her presentation and left!
One other questioner hit her with this fact...when breaking down for race, african Americans donation levels are less than 10 percent of their faction...the rest donate around 40 to 50 per cent and the over all donation rate hovers around 30 to 40 depending on polls and statistics from sources I’ve read.
The questioner pointed out that in terms of organ replacements...African Americans received 50 per cent of all donated(being 12 per cent of the total population) organs..the other 50 per cent went to recipients from among the other 88 percent of the population!
Blacks I speak to have a deep distrust of the whole donation system, not that many of them are above recieving a needed kidney if available. I sometimes think they have good reason to distrust it! That Harpy that “explained” our practice to us(she wasn’t even an RN) has only heightened my distrust of it!
“safeguard would prevent the premature harvesting of organs from Democrats”
I might be afraid to receive a heart from a Democrat, do you suppose I’d start hugging trees or develop an peculiar fondness for the color fuscia? Do you think looking at pictures of Nuke power plants would start giving me rashes? Would I have to trade my brain in?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.