A. Nephric (almost)

[Guest Pencil Machine Operator]

I couldnt help thinking of Lamentation when I heard about this gruesome story:

"Four Moscow doctors have been arrested for plotting to murder a patient so that they could use his organs for transplantation in an illegal trade which Russians fear is rife but which is seldom brought to court.

Two doctors at the Moscow city hospital No 20 and two in the city's transplantation service were arrested yesterday after a scandal which halted transplants throughout the country.

The case began when an informant told the police early last year that she had arrived at the hospital to find her friend had been "cut open" for the organs after an accident, the Russian media reported.

The victim's family pushed the police to investigate, and they began a surveillance of transplants in the Moscow hospitals.

On April 11 last year a man of 51 with serious head injuries, identified in police documents as A Orekhov, was taken to Hospital 20. A prosecutor's statement said: "The patient was listed in critical condition, which is why information about a possible donor was sent to the Moscow coordination centre for organ donation."

Alerted by the surveillance, the police rushed to the hospital with two of their own doctors and found Mr Orekhov on the operating table.

Prosecutors said they found his body prepared for kidney removal.

His hands were tied behind his head and his belly was covered in green antiseptic, was reported.

The theatre lamp was on and the surgical implements ready, but the officers found that his heart was still beating and he was technically alive. They tried to revive him, but he died of his injuries.

Russian law requires the patient to be "biologically dead" before the organs can be extracted, and a declaration signed by the intensive care doctor in charge of the patient and a police doctor before a transplant can be performed.

The investigators allegedly found no such document.

The four people arrested yesterday were Irina Litsman, deputy head of intensive care at Hospital 20, Lyubov Pravdenko, a doctor there, and the transplant surgeons at the donor centre, Pyotr Pyatnichuk and Bairm Shagdurov.

Dr Litsman has also been charged with abuse of office.

The illicit trade in human organs is a problem throughout the former Soviet Union, where young men in impoverished states such as Moldova sell their kidneys to foreigners who are willing to pay up to $250,000.

According to one case studied by European officials, the donor can be paid as little as $5,000.

The incident at Hospital 20 finally broke the silence about the trade and prompted a widespread investigation of hospital practices.

A moratorium on transplants declared after the incident lasted for months, causing an outcry from the sick and transplant surgeons. " (The Guardian, April 29, 2004)

Sorry if Iv'e put a downer on your day.

[The Old Man]

My God that's scary! Enough to put you off hospitals for life.

[Guest kath]

being brain dead.

Its not dead at all.

a couple of years ago a kid I knew from college came in to where I worked and showed me photos of his snazy sports car that he had rolled 17 times. He was taken unconsus to the hospital and the drs said he was brain dead. They brought his mother in to see him and the drs asked her to sign the papers to harvest his organs. Except for a bump on the head, his body was fine. His mother kept saying, Check his other eye, check his other eye- and the dr said, He is brain dead, His body doesn't know it yet, its just the brain stem reacting. We have to harvest the organs before the body begins to shut down and damage them.

she kept insisting he was alive. the dr became angry with her and said "I will stake my drs degree on this, he is dead, he won't ever wake up, He is dead!"

and my friend sat up on the gurney and said "No I am not."

The dr almost fainted.

My friend had an injury to the one eye as a child and that blew out the puple, and the eye dr told him that there was a 50/50 chance that if he was in an accident that it could be mis read - if the dr didn't take the time to check both.

His mother refuses to pay the dr bill.

My Dad was declaired brain dead after the nurses failed to respond to a monitor that said his o2 level had dropped below 50 %. he was with out sufficant o2 for half an hour. His brain stem was alive- and he would move about and look about and make sounds, and the decision was made to take him off of the ventilator.

the hospital overdosed him with moriphine, by raising the dose each time they came in, and it took about three hours for him to die. To this day, my mother thinks that it was because she had them take him from the ventilator that he died, I know, that had they given him dialisis, and not put him on the moriphine in the first place, my father would have lived much longer than he did..

my mother will never know that though.

Brain dead isn't dead. Dad cried while he was dieing. Just because its not at a level of life that is functional, Brain dead, isn't death.

Kath

[Raven Wolf]

Well, considering that I've been "there and back again", this whole thing realy creeps me out. I remember my Mom saying what I was repeating after I came out of my coma in 1992 after the car wreck. I didn't want to go to sleep, because as I put it, I didn't "want to go back to that dark place." The doctors insisted that I was incapable of remembering what was going in when I was in a coma, and that I'd never remember the wreck. Guess I showed THEM, HUH?

[Guest LauraKrycek]

Thought it was strange that it mentioned Moldova... that's where my roommate's from. I might have to read her that article.