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So Dick Cheney getting his heart transplant has raised the profile of the organ donor system once again.
Typically, one has to be declared “brain dead” but with a functional circulation to be a suitable donor for organs (not necessarily other “parts” such as bones or corneas) as an organ deprived of adequate circulation for a period of time (varies according to the organ) is no longer viable.
In the last couple of years, this has been expanded to include something called “circulatory death”. …typically these persons have had a massive heart attack and are not expected to survive but may not necessarily be brain dead yet.
The problem is that there is not much time to get organs from this second category of persons so according to some doctors from the University Of Michigan School Of Medicine their organs were being wasted so they advocated “treating” these post heart attack victims, in order to preserve their organs using something called an ECMO machine. Understand, once you are on ECMO and your brain is still active, you are not yet (technically) dead. Indeed, an ECMO machine is routinely used in ICU’s all the time to preserve life in people who are very much alive. But hooking up a "dead" person to ECMO is fairly recent phenomenon.
At the University Of Michigan where this practice was pioneered some years ago, if you are an organ donor and you have had a massive heart attack from which you are not expected to survive and you are placed on an ECMO, catheters with balloons on the end are inserted into your carotid arteries, the arteries that carry blood to the brain, to make sure that you are and remain brain dead.
But it gets worse.
If you are an organ donor and you are passing through Ann Arbor, don’t have a heart attack….they are moving the ECMO machines from the ICU’s at the University of Michigan Medical Center to their Emergency Rooms in order to “treat” you.
Typically, one has to be declared “brain dead” but with a functional circulation to be a suitable donor for organs (not necessarily other “parts” such as bones or corneas) as an organ deprived of adequate circulation for a period of time (varies according to the organ) is no longer viable.
In the last couple of years, this has been expanded to include something called “circulatory death”. …typically these persons have had a massive heart attack and are not expected to survive but may not necessarily be brain dead yet.
The problem is that there is not much time to get organs from this second category of persons so according to some doctors from the University Of Michigan School Of Medicine their organs were being wasted so they advocated “treating” these post heart attack victims, in order to preserve their organs using something called an ECMO machine. Understand, once you are on ECMO and your brain is still active, you are not yet (technically) dead. Indeed, an ECMO machine is routinely used in ICU’s all the time to preserve life in people who are very much alive. But hooking up a "dead" person to ECMO is fairly recent phenomenon.
At the University Of Michigan where this practice was pioneered some years ago, if you are an organ donor and you have had a massive heart attack from which you are not expected to survive and you are placed on an ECMO, catheters with balloons on the end are inserted into your carotid arteries, the arteries that carry blood to the brain, to make sure that you are and remain brain dead.
But it gets worse.
If you are an organ donor and you are passing through Ann Arbor, don’t have a heart attack….they are moving the ECMO machines from the ICU’s at the University of Michigan Medical Center to their Emergency Rooms in order to “treat” you.
RC yuh killing me
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