VioletsFramework

My fellow anesthesiologist Dr. William Perez was so disturbed by the operating room experience of anesthetizing brain-dead donors that he refused to continue participating: “First, I had to provide anesthesia to the brain-dead organ donor in a virtually identical fashion to that which I provide for other critically ill patients. It turns out that brain-dead patients react to scalpels and electrocautery similarly to my other patients. Without adequate anesthesia, they become tachycardic and hypertensive. Perhaps even more bothersome was the fact that I had to administer paralytics to prevent our organ donors from moving during the case.” “The first thing I noticed was the normal respect for the patient seemed to be missing from the room. Part of this may be that harvest teams are almost invariably from outside institutions and organ procurement companies. They travel about harvesting organs routinely and seemed, at least to me, unconcerned with the organ donor as a person. Perhaps everyone simply considered the patient on the table to be gone, so they acted consistently with that. But the joking, the music, the conversation—it all seemed so out of place.” “From cutting out and removing the heart, lungs, and liver to the later harvest of corneas and replacing long bones with the equivalent of broomsticks, the entire sequence was somewhere between disturbing and horrific.”