If you’re in the US, register here: https://registerme.org/
Sorry to hear about your friend.
I don’t think knowing this fact should discourage anyone from choosing to be a donor, though. It just means that yeah, it’s unlikely that you’ll be in a position where they can use your organs when you die, but it doesn’t hurt to be put on the list just in case.
Iirc, I think a lot of organ donations end up being from people in motor vehicle accidents.
I did get to see one case where they harvested the person’s bones instead of their organs. Didn’t even know that was a thing. I’m not sure if they died in a hospital setting or not. Might be you get more time to harvest bones as opposed to organs?
Oh yeah, I hope I don’t dissuade anyone. I just hadn’t ever really deeply thought about it before, despite being a registered organ donor. It’s an interesting conundrum to me, because you need fresh, live organs, but you can’t reasonably take those from fresh, live people most of the time, so you need people who are literally on death’s door, who aren’t going to make it, to have their bodies kept artificially alive for the purpose of organ transfer. COVID was just a fucked up situation all around with not enough beds and so many people dying. My friend had a rough experience, but it’s hardly the norm.
Yeah I’m so glad that we’re not still in that disaster. I mean, I know COVID is still out there, but thankfully in much smaller numbers and we have a much greater capacity to treat it nowadays… especially without hospitals being overwhelmed.
I’ve seen cases where patients actually ended up getting lung transplants in an attempt to save them with COVID. I handled the diseased lungs and they were so bizarre looking.
Wow, I didn’t know about the covid lung transplants. If you don’t mind me asking, could you describe the covid lungs/how they looked different to healthy lungs? Just morbidly curious