Courting over a Cadaver (Organ removal and donation)

Member Name: Plumptious

Product:	Organ removal and donation
Date:	08/02/01 (39 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Your species needs you.

Disadvantages: Make sure that you're dead first.

You're not going to like this. Not one little bit.

The thing is, when I first discovered Donor Cards, I was dead keen. I wrote off to the appropriate organization for materials and persuaded the librarian at school to let me leave stacks of cards and pamphlets in the library. When I got a paper round, I used the opportunity to pop four donor cards, a pamphlet and a car sticker through the letterbox of each house I delivered a newspaper to. All in all, I distributed a few thousand donor cards.


Later on, in college, I met new people and made new friends. My best friend was a dentist. She had paid off her mortgage, had a baby and decided to do a computing degree for a bit of a change of scenery.

Now, it might seem obvious, but dentists have to know exactly what goes on in a human head. I mean EXACTLY.

Do achieve this, they learn anatomy and then decapitate a cadaver. It's not done crudely, as in a swift chop of an axe, but carefully. All the vessels and muscles are minutely examined.

She met her husband this way. Her surname began with the letter "M" and his, "L". Because of their consequent proximity in the class roster, they shared a cadaver. They gave him a name, and spent many hours over him. Romance blossomed. From his condition, she thinks that he had lived a though life, and may have been homeless. It's all in a worthy cause - she later went on to specialize in dentistry for mental patients and people with a phobia of dentists.

It became obvious to me at that point that a phenomenal number of bodies must be required to train all the dentists and doctors that go through our universities and hospitals. This is in addition to the organ donations to live patients and research purposes that are more in the public eye.


The problem for me arose when I discovered the condition they prefer your body in when they receive it. You see, I had always thou
ght that to donate my body was really logical. Like taking a newspaper that was no longer required to the paper bank, it was the obvious and tidy thing to do.

Then I found out that this grey area exists. They don't wait until you're nice and cold. Remember, this is how realization dawned when I was still a pup, so forgive the naivete.

The decision is made that you're brain dead. And then the harvesting of the organs begins. Painkillers are not given as they would contaminate the organs.

And this is where I have the problem. I know an operating theatre nurse who has the same problem. There is no firm proof that the donor doesn't feel pain. I won't go into details, but you can imagine why I regard it as a nightmarish scenario.

I don't know how credible she was, but she also said that a lot of operating theatre staff did not carry a donor card for that kind of reason. If anyone has any new details on this subject, please speak up. I would dearly love to know that this is not the case.


So there you have it. I would be happy to donate my body to science and humanity when I'm nice and dead, but not a second before I've finished with it. Can't say fairer than that, can I?

The reality is that the medical profession has always needed this resource. We owe our knowledge of our circulatory system to a man who was a grave robber. He and many other likeminded individuals in hour history had to resort to the same methods.

Unless we are willing to deny medical students the cadavers to learn with, we have to accept this practice. The only difference is that in this day and age, we have a choice and the power to demand full knowledge of what does and does not happen.

I have deliberately avoided writing about the Alder Hey incident and others like it as there are many other opinions in this category written by people with more personal experience of it and w
ho have shared those experiences with elegance and grace.

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