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Ha!

I had a dream about a documentary I saw online. Has anybody been watching "Brooklyn DA" on CBS? On this week's show they had the most horrendous case. I've never heard of anything like it. This is what happened (not in the dream, but in the documentary):

It turns out that more people die at home and get taken straight to funeral homes than die in a hospital. But it's only in the hospitals that family is asked if they want their loved ones' organs to be donated.

So, there is a huge 'market' of bodies to be harvested for organs, bones, skin, etc. for transplant at funeral homes, and nobody doing anything about it. There are companies which buy body parts for medical purposes - perfectly legitimately - and re-sell them to hospitals. So someone needing, say, a bone graft can have the surgery using a piece of bone bought from one of these companies, or someone needing a skin graft could have skin grown from a dead person's skin. I had no f'ing idea such a thing existed, and that's bad enough without what the DA uncovered.

Apparently, there was this doctor (who'd lost his license because of drug abuse) who realised that he could make money from the funeral home market. He set up a company and had arrangements with funeral homes all over the States where he'd fly around the country removing bones and organs from the deceased - before they were embalmed - so those things could be sold through his company to clinics and hospitals.

Unfortunately no consent was given by family members. And they'd do shit like remove femurs and tibia and replace them with pieces of plastic pipe. Fucking plastic pipe! The families had no idea this had happened. So that was the first crime committed.

Then, if that wasn't bad enough, when these parts were sold, the documents were falsified, showing that the 'donors' had been fit, mid-60s and had died in a car accident or of a sudden heart attack, whereas the reality was they were much older and had died of disease.

In one case, the bones of someone who'd died from bone cancer were sold for bone grafts. And skin and tissue from people who were over 100 years old were sold to hospitals as being from 50-year olds. So the hospitals who were buying them believing them to be legitimate and fit for purpose were buying potentially diseased material that was decades older than they'd been led to believe and using it on patients.

It absolutely horrified me, and I was dwelling on it over the weekend. Then I had an awful dream last night that my leg bones had been replaced with pipes.

Girlfriend, dream, what dream? How the hell am I supposed to ship 9 of these kittens to you in CA? You said you'd take them but UPS is giving me fits. Also, the kitten / rabbit thing? Not going well. And I'm out of wine. Call 911.

May I come visit? I'll bring wine. and kitten chow. MGL, people should pay you to take the kittens, srsly.

Were they normal cat colors?

Oh, yes, they were normal cat colors, but very very vivid and with crazy wild whiskers.

mgl, how bout I ship wine and you keep the kittens?

And Senyar, apparently there are regular-ish scandals and/or shady practices with organ donation in the US.

Dammmit. Why did.I.read.this before bedtime?!!!!

Now I'm likely to dream about harvesting kittens or transfusing wine or much worse.