Thirteen years later her heart still beats.
Thank you for sharing your and your daughter’s story. Out of such a terrible tragedy, something good came from it; what a blessing for you and your family and to that little child and her family and that’s why I am an organ donor.
While I think it is very important to protect the right to life, I get angry when some people dismiss organ donation out the unfounded and irrational fears that they will have their organs ripped from their still living and breathing bodies for fun and or profit. I also think it’s wrong to paint the entire medical profession as ghoulish profit driven monsters. That was not my experience as was also so in your case.
In ’96 my mother was rushed to the hospital with what was at first thought to be a heart attack but was soon determined to be acute pancreatitis.
Within 36 hours of being admitted she had respiratory distress and was put on a ventilator. Then one by one her organs started failing.
The doctors and all the staff at Johns Hopkins were wonderful, caring, and compassionate and very dedicated to saving her life. But even with all means and brightest minds available to one of the best hospitals in the world, there was nothing that could be done for her. They never pressured us to remove her from life support but after they explained the toxins and acids from her pancreas had pretty much liquefied its self along with most of her other internal organs and that the toxins, after having gotten into her blood stream, was doing the same to her brain, we made the decision to remove her from life support.
Organ donation was of course out of the question. But the doctors did ask our consent for a full autopsy, not to determine the cause of death as that was already known but to perhaps find an underlying cause. They were very puzzled as to why a relatively healthy woman; someone with no signs of cancer, gall stones, no prior symptoms and someone who didn’t drink or smoke would have a pancreas that went so bad so quickly. They explained that it was our decision and they didn’t put any pressure on us but did explain that perhaps what they might learn from her case might help others. And so of course we consented. And I’m confident that my mother would have wanted this as well.
I’m sorry you and your mother went through that.
It’s an awful feeling for things to go so terribly wrong so quickly and you can’t do anything to stop it.
We were very fortunate to have an MD in the family, who came in and stood by us the whole time we had to make decisions.
So....important questions we never would have thought to ask - he asked them for us.
At the end - when the very crucial tests were being conducted - he was right there. Even though they didn’t have to allow him to observe, they understood that his reassurance was helping us.
The doctors I observed in this hospital were hardly a bunch of ghouls.