Subscribe to RSS @
Well, a heartbeat and five minutes if our beloved leaders get their way. That is five minutes after your last heartbeat and you become an automatic second-hand body parts supermarket.
In a drive to get more ‘donated’ organs the rules will be changed to the opposite of what we have now. If you want to allow your organs to be re-used after your death you currently need to carry a donors card or in some way make your preference known. But soon, it will be assumed you are happy to donate them if you don’t have some sort of opt-out declaration. At the same time the process for pronouncing you dead will change from brain death to 5 minutes after flat lining.
Now this is your death we’re talking about here. It only happens once and most people (I reckon) do not want it to happen but if it’s going to happen you want it to be right. You want those managing your death to be really, really sure. What you don’t want is some guy standing in the corner of the room with a scalpel, body saw, cool box and a stopwatch.
We will be told by those empowered to lead that there will be safeguards. There are always safeguards. That’s why, for example, hardly a week goes by without some government department losing huge quantities of personal data. Safeguards. That’s why the NHS is constantly in the middle of lawsuits. And the first time something goes wrong and some poor bloke is carved up who should not have been or was carved up after only 4 and a quarter minutes, we will be told that ‘lessons have been learned’. And they’ll say that the second time and the third time and… on and on. Because that is what they always say.
The practice of medicine today makes the practice of medicine even just fifty years ago look frighteningly hit and miss. Yet I believe what we do not know still far outweighs what we do. I was, up until now, happy to carry a donors card. Now I want one of the other ones.
It’s a shame, but I can no longer accept anything this government says without thinking “and how will they fuck this up ?”
Have you heard of the “Turdis Touch” – it’s similar to the “Midas’ Touch”, except instead for everything you touch turning to gold, it has a rather different effect !
@Malc: Yep – think you’ve got that about right.
I used to carry a donor card for years. You can tell how long ago it was because on the back I’d written “If I’m involved in any major accident I don’t want Mrs Thatcher or any other politician turning up at my bedside to make political capital out of it”. But then a few horror stories from doctors I’d worked with about people not being dead enough when they had their organs removed, rather put me off the whole thing. I think you’re entirely right: we can trust the government to get it entirely wrong.
Daphnes last blog post..Allsorts
@Daphne: … just like everything else!
Well this made me think exactly the same thing as your closing statement. I want to swap my donor card for one of the other ones now.
Daphne’s comment ‘…people not being dead enough…’ only compounds this thought.
@Jeni: I suspect this will become a common stance…