Word: donor
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Three Criteria. Surgeon Barnard was equally confident that the time of a prospective donor's death can be determined clearly enough to indicate when his heart may be taken, although the subject is technically complex. Under South African law, he said, a patient is dead when he has no reflexes, is no longer breathing, and his heart has stopped. The Groote SchuUr Hospital team faithfully applied these criteria in the case of Donor Denise Darvall. Certainly, said Barnard, he could have restarted her heart, but it would soon have stopped again because her brain was dead...
...problem was to find a donor. Maimonides sent telegrams to 500 hospitals across the U.S., asking to be notified of the birth of an anencephalic baby (with a malformed head and virtually no brain) or one with such severe brain injury that it could not long survive. There are a thousand or more such cases every year in the U.S., but long days passed before Dr. Kantrowitz got the word that he was awaiting. It came from Philadelphia's Jefferson Hospital: an anencephalic boy was born there the day after Washkansky's surgery. Dr. Kantrowitz talked with...
...Regrets. The donor baby's understanding parents were soon identified as Attorney Keith Bashaw, 40, and his wife Celeste, 31, who live in Cherry Hill, N.J., across the Delaware from Philadelphia. They have two healthy children, aged 7 and 5. The anencephalic third was delivered by caesarean section. Said Bashaw: "We thought we could turn our sorrow into somebody else's hope. We're sorry it didn't work -but we're not sorry...
...ethical difficulty in heart transplants arises from medical uncertainty. Even when the heart has "stopped cold" and there is no more respiration, the condition is often reversible-as is proved countless times every day by first-aid squads and lifeguards as well as doctors. The surgeon wants the donor's heart as fresh as possible, before lack of oxygen causes deterioration or damage-that is, within minutes of death. This has raised the specter of surgeons' becoming not only corpse snatchers but, even worse, of encouraging people to become corpses. The question remains: Where should the line...
...heart. The animal heart has been used only once, in a case that illuminated both sides of the surgeon's dilemma. At the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Dr. James D. Hardy had, on three occasions, a patient dying of brain injuries who would have been a suitable donor-but he had no recipient. Twice, when he had potential recipients of a transplant, he had no human donors. One candidate to receive a transplant, who seemed to be dying after a heart attack, bewildered the surgeons by getting well enough to go home. When the other was undeniably dying...