Organ donor wakes in the nick of time
Published 11 June, 2008, 16:00
It’s the stuff of nightmares. A man in France woke up just as surgeons were about to cut him open to remove his organs. His heart hadn’t worked for at least an hour and a half when the doctors began the operation, reports the French newspaper, Le Monde.
The incident was later investigated by Paris University Hospital's ethics committee.
The 45-year-old suffered a massive cardiac attack. Paramedics tried to resuscitate him less then 10 minutes after the coronary, but with no success.
When the patient arrived at hospital, doctors said the man could not be saved and called for transplantation specialists to remove his organs for donation.
During the waiting time they massaged the patient’s failed heart, but it didn’t respond in the hour and a half it took for the surgeons to arrive.
As the doctors were about to start the operation, the patient suddenly began to breathe, his pupils reacted to light and he exhibited a reaction to pain.
“After several weeks of serious complications the man is now walking and talking. It’s not clear yet whether his brain was damaged,” said the commission report.
The incident has raised concerns over so-called controlled non-heart-beating organ donation (NHBOD) –whereby organs are retrieved when the heart stops. The practice was adopted in France last year. Before then a patient had to be declared brain dead before organs could be removed.
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