Saving lives, by redefining death

Luckily for all concerned, in Amanda’s case, very soon after she was unplugged from the ventilator she didn’t breathe and her heart stopped. Surgeons took her liver, kidneys and pancreas.

Amen to that.

Amanda illustrates a new form of organ donation that can help address our ever-widening gap between the supply and demand of viable organs: patients who are not quite dead but very much dying, be it from brain death or cardiac death.

With modern technology like respirators and tube feedings, the brain damaged, unconscious Amanda could have been kept “alive” for a very long time. Kept ”alive” with zero possibility of recapturing a viable life. Draining away both her existence and the life her organs could give others.

Truog’s (and for that matter Sanghavi’s) exasperation with the current definition of “death” reminds one of Jeremiah 5:21: ” Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not“. Simply put, patients have begun dying, and the only uncertainty is when, not if. Patients’ families accept this and ask to donate their relative’s organs. But there’s a roadblock: the patient is not, as currently defined,  “dead”.

So let’s move the roadblock.

The Dead Donor Rule impedes the ability to harvest organs by defining death too narrowly, robbing some patients of their wishes to donate viable organs and resulting in hastening deaths amongst would be transplant recipients.

Just as we have long debated when life begins, perhaps it’s time we debated just when life ends.

There are 1,600 people on organ transplant waiting lists in Australia. 1,600 reasons to start that debate.