More on organ donation and "brain death"

In an earlier post on this blog, I mentioned my reservations about donation of vital organs, because of problems with the concept of "brain death." Here is another story of a patient who recovered consciousness after being just minutes away from having his vital organs harvested for donation:

Doctors Who Almost Dissected Living Patient Confess Ignorance about Actual Moment of Death

PARIS, France, June 12, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Parisian whose organs were about to be removed by doctors after he had "died" of a heart attack, revived on the operating table only minutes before doctors began to harvest his organs.

The 45 year-old man, whose name has been withheld by the French media, was given heart massage by paramedics after collapsing on a street in Paris earlier this year. He was then transferred to a nearby hospital for further emergency procedures, but doctors were not able to restore a consistent heartbeat.

After deciding that they would be unable to dilate the coronary artery (which supplies the heart with blood and is blocked or constricted during a heart attack), the doctors decided to extract the patient's organs for transplant. Transplant doctors were not available at the time, and heart massage was applied for an hour and thirty minutes until the doctors arrived. Le Monde newspaper says that during this period doctors were still unable to revive the heart.

However, when the transplant doctors prepared to operate, they noticed the patient was breathing, his pupils were dilating and he was reacting to pain. He was very clearly alive.

Several weeks later, the patient was walking and talking.

(read more)

Another link worth checking out on this topic is Organ donation: The inconvenient truth by Dr. John Shea. It discusses medical and moral issues (specifically from a Catholic perspective) regarding "brain death" and "cardiac death" criteria.