Re: Organs harvested from living person in New York City.
- From: "ltlee1" <ltlee1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 23 Apr 2006 08:23:07 -0700
James wrote:
Of course face transplant is now history but a few years ago it was
still a ethics question.
The following is from
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=940CE5D61F3CF93AA35750C0A9659C8B63
It describes how organs are routinely harvested in the US from live
"brain dead" people. Note the passage "all that moved was her heart,
beating without any signal or governance from the brain, beating with
no other compulsion than its own primordially instilled, deep cellular
memory to do so."
Whatever unpleasant and wrong in the world was transformed into
accusations against China.
March 9, 2003
Making Faces
By CHARLES SIEBERT
A few years ago, in the course of researching an article for this
magazine about the human heart, I was allowed to accompany a couple of
surgeons from a hospital near New York on what is known as an organ
harvest. We were on call to extract a heart from the next available
''brain dead'' donor.
''If anyone asks,'' I remember the head surgeon telling me outside the
operating room the night our call finally came, ''you are here to
observe.''
The other harvest teams -- liver, kidney, pancreas -- were already in
place when we arrived, pressed elbow to elbow around the operating
table. I must have frozen a moment upon entering the O.R. I remember a
number of people turning to stare. One began to approach. There was the
press of a hand on my right arm. It was the head heart surgeon, leading
me farther in. He brought me to the very top of the operating table and
positioned me there, my hands clenched beside the head of the donor. A
young woman, was all I had been told, who had died earlier that evening
of a brain aneurysm.
I first saw only the blue cloth covering the donor's face and then,
lifting my head, her body, split open from the shoulders to the waist:
a glistening, multishaded inscape of organs. But for the lungs --
spongy pink, diaphanous, rising and falling with the whooshing clicks
of a respirator -- all that moved was her heart, beating without any
signal or governance from the brain, beating with no other compulsion
than its own primordially instilled, deep cellular memory to do so.
I remember my body making one brief, dizzying pitch forward and then,
like the quick flip of a focus knob, a compensatory lurch back. And
then my mind did this: it withdrew, pulled like a just-brushed anemone,
all of its feelers in. It took refuge in anonymity, the donor's and by
extension my own. I had seen more of, and further into, this human
being than I had anyone in my life, and yet somehow to have seen her
face, the most surface aspect of her, would have been my undoing.
---------go to site for full story----------------------
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Organs harvested from living person in New York City.
- From: lechergod
- Re: Organs harvested from living person in New York City.
- References:
- Prev by Date: Re: How much is gasoline in China?
- Next by Date: Re: Organs harvested from living person in New York City.
- Previous by thread: Organs harvested from living person in New York City.
- Next by thread: Re: Organs harvested from living person in New York City.
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
