Posted on 06/13/2008 2:15:52 PM PDT by joan
A man whose heart had stopped beating woke up just as surgeons were about to remove his organs for donation, it was disclosed yesterday.
Doctors in Paris earlier this year called in transplant surgeons after failing to resuscitate a 45-year old man believed to have suffered a massive heart attack in the French capital.
According to a report by the Paris university hospital's ethics committee - seen by Le Monde newspaper - doctors continued providing a heart massage for an hour and a half while they waited for the surgeons to arrive.
When the surgeons began operating on the man to remove his organs, he began to breathe, his pupils became responsive and he reacted to a pain test.
"After a few weeks chequered with serious complications, the patient is now walking and talking," said the report. It is not known whether the man is aware of how close he was to losing his organs.
The incident highlights the ethical problems doctors face in deciding when a donor is really dead.
Emergency service staff interviewed in the report said they knew of other situations where "a person who everyone was convinced was dead survived after prolonged re-animation moves well beyond usual timeframes or even those considered reasonable."
They pointed out that if they had followed the rules to the letter, such patients "would probably have been considered deceased."
In particular, the case is likely to ignite public debate over so-called controlled non-heart-beating organ donation (NHBOD) – retrieving organs when the heart stops, which has only been legal in France since last year. Before then a patient had to be declared brain dead before transplant could occur. NHBOD is legal in the UK.
"All specialised medical literature on the subjects allows one to conclude that a person who has suffered cardiac arrest and has had proper heart massage for over 30 minutes is, for all purposes, brain dead," said Professor Alain Tenaillon, in charge of organ transplants at France's biomedical agency. "But one must acknowledge that exceptions do exist ... there are no hard and fast rules on best practice," he told Le Monde.
Some 13,000 people are awaiting organ donations in France, a far higher number than in Britain, with 7,700 awaiting organs, despite France's a so-called opt-out system. This means everyone gives their "presumed consent" to having their organs removed after death unless either they have refused permission or if their family objects.
In the UK, people "opt in" to the donation system by carrying a donor card or signing the Organ Donor Register. A Department of Health task force is currently looking into the opt-out system.
Good movie too.
“I’m feeling much better.”
To Those who think that “Organ Donor” is a praiseworthy thing:
The love of life is why you should ask, you should consider well, WHERE an “organ” gets taken from. It is always from another person whose life we ALSO must hold dear.
Was that person *really* dead?
Despite the arguments — logical and scientific, even moral — for sureness that a living person is wholly dead, we do NOT know it so well. This is the real world where we are limited in spiritual awareness, even the most aware of us are like those who are almost totally blind as to how the soul and the body bind together and how and when they separate during a death.
It is clear from reports, and also personal experience for many of us, that great pressures on brought upon survivors at their most vulnerable time in order that they declare a loved one “gone”, so that the organs be harvested in a condition most suitable for transplant. That the process of decay and cell death not get far advanced, that the organ — especially those like hearts, lungs, livers — be fresh.
Those pressures can be presumed — for we are human, we have all sorts of competing emotions and desires, in addition to our corrective good senses. The pure light of moral wisdom which G-d granted each of us in our soul is hidden, and at times darkened near to cold black. Those who NEED the organs can be POTENT men and woman, willing to bring great forces to bear upon our advisers, upon those in the transplant process. That happened in this case. It surely happens all the time.
(doctor)No, no, no, this will never do. This heart is already allocated to that man over there. I’m afraid you re going to have to surrender it.
(parts box) But it’s my heart!
(doctor) It is most certainly not. Its property of the state, now surrender it or I shall call for the guards.
I wasn't so lucky, I awoke in a bathtub in a Las Vegas hotel only to find someone had taken one of my kidneys.........
Pain test? Are you kidding me?! They had already cut him open, but decided that they needed to administer a pain test? I hate to imagine what that was.
Cases like this should lead to far more challenges of the ‘brain dead is dead’ standard for organ donation.
“No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a minute.”
Have fun stormin’ the castle, boys...
"I'm still using it!"
"OW! Give me my liver back, you idiot! I'm not finished with it yet!"
Me too.
I work in health care, and I won’t sign a donor card either.
I know how callous some of my coworkers and doctors are: I don’t want them EVER to decide that my “quality of life” won’t be worth living, and that several other “deserving” people will better benefit from my vital organs.
On the bright side, the doctors’ eagerness to keep the organs fresh led to heroic measures that may have saved his life.
I don’t know if it’s some kind of urban myth or not. I once heard that you shouldn’t sign organ donor cards because in an emergency they might not try too hard to resusitate if they see you are a donor.
Since when is it selfish to control ownership of your own body? I expect even control of your own flesh will eventually be taken by the state. Wasn’t there another thread about the UK making organ donation automatic unless you specifically file to opt out?
Foot - he was literally minutes away from permanently being dead...
He had a heart-on and nobody noticed?
yes there was an article about the UK making it organ donation the default.
There was also a recent story about a coroner that refused to return body parts of a dead guy to the family. The family lost in court as there was no law saying they actually had ‘ownership’ of the body and associated parts. Must be limited to that state but it give you a pause thinking the govt can do whatever it wants with your body. Kinda like China does with its prisoners.
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