Close call in death ruling of potential organ donor

It seems counterintuitive that doctors would rather take organs out of a dying organ donor than possibly extend his life. A California man, John Foster, was pronounced brain-dead by two doctors independent of each other, and the hospital was ready to pull the plug. When the patients daughter saw the 2nd doctor come in, spend no more than 5 minutes with the patient, and pronounced him brain-dead by simply shining a light into his eyes, she knew something fishy was going on.

A third doctor was called in, spend a little less than an hour with the patient, and noticed he still had a gag and cough reflex, both of which are signs a patient is not brain-dead. It must also be noted that the patient was on the organ donation list, and was only two signatures away from donating all of his organs.

The doctors are now suspected of wrongfully declaring the patient brain-dead in order to have his organs removed to be given to patients awaiting them. We now are alarmed that this type of malpractice is a more widespread occurrence than we may think. Doctors may be pronouncing loved-ones legally dead while they really aren’t, just so they can remove their organs and put them inside somebody else.

How Mom’s Death Changed My Thinking About End-of-Life Care

It seems counterintuitive to spend so much money on a loved one who is almost certainly going to die. Charles Orstein’s mother Harriet was sent into a coma after her heart stopped while doctors were inserting a nasogastric tube. She was hooked up to a breathing machine, had a feeding tube inserted,  and was given a constant iv drip of medication to stabilize her blood pressure. Obviously this all costs a whole lot of money, on top of the cost to even be admitted in a hospital room. So Charles started wondering if end of life care is really worth it. He was really skeptical that she wouldn’t make it out of her coma because she had survived several accidents prior, but test after test seemed to solidify the reality that she wasn’t coming back.

Charles and his family had a decision to make, unplug her and fulfill her wishes, or prolong her treatment at a chance of a recovery. Ultimately they unplugged Harriet and she went very peacefully, but this situation left Charles thinking. End of life care is a very expensive ordeal and Charles was wondering if he had make the wrong decision in keeping her on life support for two extra days while he tried to make a decision about his mother.  Ultimately Charles called an expert and asked him if he made the wrong decision. The expert agreed with his decision and said he would had still backed him if he had left her on life support for several more weeks.

Paper or Plastic?

It seems counterintuitive that producing more wood products, such as paper and lumber, can cut down on pollution. Paper actually combats air pollution. It’s been proven that a ton of paper can hold up to 400lbs of carbon from being released back into the environment. When paper is burned, it is turned into just carbon, than the carbon atoms pair up with two oxygen atoms and create carbon dioxide, or CO2, a greenhouse gas that is harmful to Earth’s atmosphere. So as paper is recycled instead of burned, more and more carbon is being stored in that paper rather than released into the air to be paired up with oxygen and destroy our Ozone.

Paper decomposes though, so it’s not as effective of a solution to carbon storage than we think. Wood itself is a much better storage facility for carbon. So there has been a recent push to construct buildings made of mostly wood rather than metals. So think twice before tossing that piece of paper into the trash can rather than the recycle bin.