Having worked in the tissue and organ donation field, I can tell you that this article is peppered with misleadings. It's also 9 years old.

Only after the family’s state legislator and the regional organ-procurement organization got involved did the insurance company agree to pay.

Insurance companies do not pay for anything having to do with the donation. They would pay for the hospital stay up to the point of the boy's death, but once that happens the cost of the hospital stay and the surgery for the donation is all taken care of by the procuring agency.

they still had trouble with the notion that, to become a donor, it was not enough for their son to die with his body more or less intact. He would have to have the right kind of death, with the systems in his body shutting down in a particular order.

The type of death is what determines what types of organs and tissues can be donated. Tissue donation (corneas, skin, veins, heart valves, bone) can happen up to 24 hours after an individual's death--in a hospital, in a car accident, at home in one's sleep--brain death not required. The type of donation you see in the movies (heart recovered from patient, placed into cooler, flown to another hospital and immediately placed into a prepared recipient) is the kind that requires the blood to still be pumping through the donor's body via machines. Once the blood stops pumping, the major organs are not viable for transplant.

(An organ-donor card is merely an indication of a patient’s wishes; the family has the final word.)

In many states, an organ donor card is a legally binding agreement and the procurement agency is within their legal rights to move forward with the donation even if the family doesn't approve. 99.99% of the time they don't because it would be a PR disaster for an organization the requires people to volunteer. For brain-dead organ donors, the procurement team can get all of the medical information needed from doing blood tests and such right after the brain death, but for tissue donors who may have been brain- and heart-dead for hours already, they can only get the necessary medical information from the Next of Kin. That questionnaire is much like the one for blood donors - have you been to Africa since the 1960s? had a homosexual experience? used a needle for recreational drug use? have Hepatitis C? - really really tough questions to ask grieving family members.

He was showing signs, that is, of precisely the kind of systemic functioning that the brain dead would generally be expected to lack.

The brain patterns of someone in a coma are vastly different than the brain patterns of someone who has been declared brain dead. This whole notion of 'brain death and comas are the same thing' is not factual, and is one of the reasons a lot of people are really confused by it.

In the end, the only organs he was able to donate were his eyes.

This pisses me off the most. ONLY his eyes. He was ONLY able to bring sight back to one or two people, people who haven't been able to go fishing or see their kids grow up or drive a car or read a book or see their spouse's smile. I've talked to those people, recipients of ONLY a cornea, and their lives have drastically improved after receiving their transplant. His donation was ONLY able to change someone's life, but maybe not in the way he had imagined. Did you know the bone from one donor can help up to EIGHTY (80) different people? With their knees, their backs, their necks, their hips.


Wow, I'm sorry for that long-winded rant. There's just so much misconception about donation, and articles like this one don't help.

I am an organ donor and proud of it. I don't know what, or even if, my body will be able to donate after my death, but I will not let that stop me from being available. Your decision to be an organ donor or not be an organ donor is your personal decision and I will not talk you into or out of it.

Thank you for that comment rhapsodie. When my dad died a number of years ago, we were disappointed that he could only donate the corneas. Your comment gave me a different perspective on that.

I would like to favourite that comment, rhapsodie. So much great info, and perspective.

I found the article very confronting in a way - I'm inclined to agree with the 'noble lie' concept. Despite not having the sort of scientific knowledge that allows me to make informed comment, it fits well with how I feel about the whole 'brain dead' thing - a convenient, but very arbitrary, way of defining the indefinable. It seems that, because we still don't really understand what makes us alive (maybe we never will), we have no way to really define when we stop being alive.

I'm explaining myself poorly, I know. I'm a real supporter of organ donation although, like rhapsodie, I think it is a very personal decision that every individual should make and not be questioned on. Something that worries me if I consider it is that my partner, who would be the one to make such a decision, is strongly against organ donation and I worry that she would overrule my decision to be a donor as she would be unable to bring herself to go against her own beliefs at a time of great stress. I hope not, but it bothers me. When I asked her, she couldn't say what she would do.