Tag: organ donation
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Xenotransplantation—giving animal organs to humans
Dr. Alexis Carrel. Photo originally published by Bain News Service, June 1922. From Flickr Commons project and The Evening World via the Library of Congress George Grantham Bain Collection. Via Wikimedia. No known restrictions on publication. In the early 1990s a distinguished scientist predicted that within twenty years thousands of lives would be saved by…
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The Lazarus phenomenon: when the dead return to life
Tom Sewe Nairobi, Kenya Photo by Günter Valda on Unsplash It is a few minutes after 2 AM. A middle-aged woman lays motionless on a table in a hospital emergency department with tubes protruding from multiple orifices. The relentless cardiac monitor screams its flat-line signal as the code-blue team pants, scrubs clinging to their…
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Grit
Romalyn AnteWolverhampton, England My mother is right—my brother’s blood is getting dirtier. A nurse like me, she had read the result of his glomerular filtration rate, a test that measures how well the kidneys clean the blood. It had dropped below 15, an indication that his chronic renal failure was reaching its end stage. Some…
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Scarred for life
Shanda McCutcheon Calgary, Alberta, Canada Three Months Post Donation, Michael, his wife Rebecca and their two youngest children with Shanda (far right) Source: Personal photograph of author Most mornings I wake and it does not seem like it happened at all. Still half asleep, I step under the cascading waters of a warm shower…
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The color of organ markets
Howsikan Kugathasan Toronto, Ontario, Canada Dark Room, Single Light: the contrast between black and white markets Nawaraj Pariyar from Nepal is promised thirty thousand dollars for “a piece of meat” that will grow back. Only later does he find out that he was duped twice. He received less than 1% of his promised money…
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Death and the organ donor
Karen Dyer United Kingdom A Work in Progress by Cathy Peters, RN, MS, APRN-BC Collage art: news and magazine print 24 X 36 inches Historically the “death debate” has been long and intensive, and the definition of death has evolved over the centuries. The ancient civilizations looked for an “absence of a heartbeat” and…