I plan to donate my organs -- but I've taken my name off the registry [View all]

(I DID NOT WRITE THIS ARTICLE)

For decades, I have encouraged friends and family to register as organ donors. As an intensive care nurse, I’ve mourned patients who died needing a transplant, and I’ve joined “honor walks” accompanying dying patients to the operating room for their life-changing donations. When I die, I want to donate my own organs and help my family find meaning in my death. But I no longer believe that being on the donor registry is the right way to accomplish those goals.

My change of heart began years ago with a patient who suffered a catastrophic health event and was being kept barely alive by machines. (For reasons of privacy, I can’t identify the patient, even by sex, so I will use the pronoun “they.”) They could no longer consciously communicate, but they grimaced whenever they woke up and felt the tubes we had placed down their throat and in their groin, urethra, neck and wrists. Recognizing that the patient was suffering but not improving, the ICU team offered to stop our futile efforts and instead transition them to comfort care and a peaceful death. After more agonizing days, the family asked us to stop the patient’s suffering.

As required by law, we alerted the regional organ procurement organization. When its representative arrived, she informed the family that, because the patient had registered years ago while obtaining a driver’s license, the organization was authorized to begin preparations for transplant. This meant the patient had to remain on life support for more hours or days while the procurement organization identified potential recipients, assembled the donation surgical team and coordinated timing, transportation and other factors; they also would monitor the patient and request other treatments if necessary to keep the organs viable.

The distraught family explained that the patient likely registered inadvertently, that English was a second language, that donating in this way conflicted with the patient’s religious beliefs and that the patient would not have wanted to be kept nominally alive without hope of recovery while their children sobbed at the bedside. The decision to withdraw life support was hard enough, the family pleaded. They asked to be left to grieve.

But the representative said she was merely notifying them — not asking permission. She said the organization had the right to procure the patient’s organs and to continue life support in the meantime, regardless of family objection.

https://wapo.st/4aGugJx