JBInvolved

About Me

Fifteen days since I’ve written and those days have been, for the most part, absolutely crazy. I spent the first part of that completing my last stay in St Louis. That’s right I said last (last of the 8 day stretches anyway), I am finally home and getting into some sort of a groove, or at least trying to. The first week home I was not on-call but Springfield was busy busy. I worked two cases but had the potential for four. I slept half the day on the 24th due to being in the operating room on a kid over night.

Did you know that less than 1% of deaths are candidates for organ donation?

Just because someone dies does not mean they are eligible to donate their organs. They have to meet certain criteria; the person has to have sustained some sort of head injury. This means you have a stroke from bleeding (hemorrhagic), maybe from an aneurysm rupture, a vessel tear from high blood pressure or from traumatic head injury. Other reasons for brain injury are caused from lack of oxygen to the brain maybe from your heart stopping for an extended period of time (anoxic) or you have a blood clot in your body that moves to the brain and cuts off oxygen supply to part of the tissue (ischemic).

A traumatic hemorrhage could be sustained from several possibilities. A visit to the chiropractor and you get work done to your neck, the next thing you know your carotid artery (the main artery supplying blood to your brain) has been severed by improper movement. You are 20 years old and out on a joy ride with some friends, the driver is being a prankster and looses control, the car swerves and hits a pole, you aren’t wearing your seat belt and are thrown from the vehicle hitting your head on a tree. This causes your brain to rub against the skull several times causing massive injury throughout the brain. Or, for whatever reason, you get a bullet, knife, piece of a car or any other sharp object penetrating into the brain. All of these scenarios, and many others, cause an injury to the brain that usual involves bleeding, fracture, swelling and lack of oxygen to the brain tissue.

In order to be an organ donor from any of these types of brain injuries you must suffer either severe deficits and require life support for the remainder of your existence (which most people would not want to live like this) or you are declared brain dead.