Jesica's death

[Guest lots of thinking]

Hi!!

I wanted to get people's opinions on the death of the girl in the states who recieved a heart/lung transplant with the wrong blood type and subsequently died after the second transplant (wow is this ever devestating).

I'm not too familiar with the story, so I have a couple of questions.

1) I heard that there was talk about not performing the second transplant (so that the organs could go to someone with a better chance of survival). Was that really an option??

 

2) I"m curious as to how she was on the donar list in the first place, not being an American citizen- I'm not really sure how that works???

 

thought people might want to know that this was an issue brought up at several UofC interviews this past week.

 

M

[Guest Biochem10]

Hi, there's a thread regarding this in the Med students forum, you might want to check it out. botched transplant in NC

[Guest UWOMED2005]

The second donation was to give JESICA another set of organs, not give the first organs she'd been donated to someone else. Unfortunately, the second transplant was either too late or cause complications.

[Guest therealcrackers]

The university centre in question has a policy of performing a small percentage of their transplants on non-citizen patients. Jesica (yes, that's the correct spelling) was in the able-to-pay category, but she had irreversible brain damage as a result of the drugs, the two transplant operations, and the supportive procedures necessary...

 

see the other thread for a much longer discussion of this...