With organ donation, the death of 1 person will result in the survival of many others. However once a donor dies, how do doctors save their organs for transplantation?
In order to be an organ donator, you have to be in a hospital, on a ventilator and have some sort of neurologically devastating harm, stated the Chief Operations Officer of Lifebanc, Northeast Ohio’s organ procurement organization.
There are 2 ways in which this may happen: brain death and cardiac death. Cardiac death happens once the patient has such severe brain harm that they would never build a full recovery. This harm can be to different elements of the brain. They may have a small amount of brain functionality, however, the physician determines that they’ll never be able to recover. The donor is simply kept alive by a ventilator, that their family might choose to take away them from. This person would be considered legally dead once their heart stops beating.
Most given organs return from cases of brain death, in which the donor has no brain function, according to a 2020 study within the journal BMJ Open. This patient has irreversible loss of function of all regions of the brain, as well as the brain stem. A doctor diagnoses an individual as “brain dead” once that patient is in a deep coma, has no brain stem reflexes, and fails an apnea check that serves to confirm that all brain function has been lost. An individual who is brain dead is legally dead, though they are still breathing with a ventilator. The physician, not the organ transplant team, makes that decision.
Routine blood tests will reveal whether or not organs such as the liver and kidneys are healthy. The organ procurement team typically inspects the donor’s heart for harm or blockage by sticking a skinny tube into an artery or vein and threading it through their blood vessels to the heart. The team can even use a chest X-ray to evaluate the lungs for size, infection, or signs of disease. They will do additional testing by projecting a skinny tube into the lungs to further evaluate infection and confirm if antibiotics are needed. Brains are never transplanted, however, all different organs can be given in the case of brain death; in the case of cardiac death, the heart is probably going too damaged to donate.
The surgeons fly the organs back to the recipients and start the transplantation. They must act quickly; the heart and lungs will last 4 to 6 hours outside the body, the pancreas 12 to 24 hours, the liver up to 24 hours, and therefore the kidneys 48 to 72 hours, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). Meanwhile, the donor’s body, with organs removed, is ready for a funeral or other memorial service.
Organ donation saves lives, however not enough. Each day, 20 individuals die waiting for a transplant in the U.S., in line with the HRSA. Although 90% of adults within the country support organ donation, solely 60% are registered donors. Even those that have signed up might run into issues with a donation if they haven’t made their wishes clear to their family. The biggest challenge that we face after we meet with families is them saying, ‘I don’t understand what they need to do. We never had this conversation.
