I know the thread title is creepy. I assure all of you that I am not suicidal and this question is not applicable to any real situation as far as I am aware. It’s just idle curiosity. But say that someone who was young and healthy DID want to commit suicide, while preserving as many possible organs for donation. Where should they do it, and what method should be used?
I was thinking maybe a (relatively) benign drug overdose with a note stapled to their coat, timed so they drop dead right outside of a major hospital would be good, but then there’s always the possibility of having a stomach pump or being resuscitated. Or could they call someone like Dr. Kevorkian with this type of request?
But couldn’t that damage the eyes/optic nerve? I was thinking more like a morphine overdose, though I don’t know the precise side effects… would that make the liver untransplantable? I’m guessing a coke overdose would kill your heart.
Gunshot would probably provide the cleanest death but any delay in finding the body would put most organs past their Use By date.
Best bet: A gunshot wound that would render the shooter/shootee brain dead & on life support with no hope of recovery. ** If** his wish to donate organs had been recorded and/or communicated to his next-of-kin, the plug could be pulled & the various bits distributed.
Unless there are medico/legal problems about organs from suicides. Perhaps we’ll hear from somebody who’s worked in the field.
Do you need spoiler tags for TV episodes that aired years ago? Can’t hurt I guess
[SPOILER]Actually I remember an ER episode where a father shot himself in the head so that his one remaining kidney would be donated to his daughter. The story was that he had already donated one kidney to her, but a drug trial botched that up.
His suicide is not in the summary ^^. Obviously it was a few years ago so I could be fuzzy on the storyline. But, if you trust my memory, and ER writers for scientific accuracy, then there’s one point for gunshot to the head. IIRC she did get the kidney.
I know they transplant corneas (which should be undamaged by a well-aimed gunshot to the soft palate), but are entire eyeballs being transplanted nowadays?
If they are, well, just aim a little lower, shoot out the brain stem/top of the neck.
Whatever you do, it needs to be near a hospital so they can recover your body pronto and put it on life support, but it also needs to do irreversible, fatal damage to undonatable parts of your body. I can’t think of many things other than a gun in the mouth.
Freezing tissue renders it unusable for transplant.
And no, they’re not transplanting whole eyes, only corneas. I think if you’re going to wreck one organ, that would be the one to give up. No one dies on the waiting list for a corneal transplant from corneal-related issues.
“Cleanup on aisle five” is a small price to pay for a whole body’s worth of donated organs. That said, you’re right, there’s no reason not to try to control the mess, unless it slows the whole suicide process down so much that bystanders have a chance to intervene before you complete your work.
To quote Vinnie Antonelli:“Richie loved to use 22s because the bullets are small and they don’t come out the other end like a 45, see, a 45 will blow a barn door out the back of your head and there’s a lot of dry cleaning involved, but a 22 will just rattle around like Pac-Man until you’re dead.”
I like the Self-guillotining, in fact if I’m getting to choose that’s what I’m going for, but it’s a bit hard to pull off in public. I’d think strangulation would probably be the best but again it’s tough to time it so you die where you can be harvested but they can’t save you.
It can take several hours for an organ procurement team to do their assessment of qualification and get consent for donation from the family during which time the patient must still have perfusion of the organs. This typically means brain death but otherwise still alive on life support. So any method which actually kills you outright (decapitation) or kills you where there isn’t medical help available (drug overdose at home) is not going to work. Nonfatal gun shot wound to head in close proximity to emergency treatment is probably the best bet.
