Would like to hear some of your comments…
See this thread…
Yes. I can say that. I heard on NPR, a quote from the Hospital Administrator late last week. He was EXTREMELY specific. The surgeon dropped the ball not once, but twice.
There’s no captian of the ship nonsense to hide behind here. He is ultimately the one to confirm the match of donor organs and patient, it was made very clear in that interview, as well as in other reports I have read on this story.
Yanno, now and then a person is solely responsible for a nightmarishly awful fuck-up. This isn’t Morton-Thiokol with bad O-Rings, this isn’t Dow-Corning with silicone. This is one highly skilled adult who blew BOTH checkpoints in an effort to be the hero.
HE blew it. Not the hospital, not the parents, not the kid, not the dead donor. Not the National clearinghouse that matched the kid and donor. This Surgeon made a mistake. TWICE. If he’d not asked the National clearinghouse that supplied him with the organs, he would have wasted those most precious donor organs, but would have found out BEFORE he put them INTO this girl, by checking the units and paperwork in the O.R. It is the hubris of presumed MDiety. Get used to it. It’s real, it happens.
Why is that so hard to understand? He wanted to play God and rush the system instead of doing his job? Fine. The world is full of fallen dieties, he will be in good company. I stand by my orignal post, this man should have his license revoked, just before he’s indicted for Negligent Homicide.
Her mother is refusing to donate any of her organs. Go figure.
Sadly, the young girl died on Saturday afternoon. I believe that the first transplant with the wrong blood type staying for over two weeks caused the massive detioration of the body and the ehtical issues with the new organs with the correct blood type, after the swelling of the brain originated, is now going to be the dilemma. Everyone makes mistakes. It is just so devastating when it is with human lives. The Cardiac department at Duke is one of the most excellent around this area and the hospital received what was ordered, I believe. The initial surgery with the wrong blood type would have caused irreversible damage probably, so the ethical dilemma would be whether this young girl would have been the best served at the top of the donor list with the damage already caused. I do not know how many very ill patients are on the waiting list, but the new organs were not allowed, I hear, by the parents, to be donated. I also heard on the news that the organs could have been used and may have worked for another person in need of the same organs.
I am sure we will hear much more about the ethical issues surrounding this dilemma. I just hope that there won’t be massive lawsuits and discussions of whether or not they were living here illegally to further insult the horrible tragedy for the family, the physicians, the nurses, the anesthetists and all employees at Duke, because, as in any emergency, mistakes are made and, this one is truly horrible. But so many horrible things have happened this year…like the fire in Rhode Island, the lack of funding for homeland security and the threat of war; this is certainly not to minimize the travesty at Duke, but we must have faith in our medical community, our government, our freedom, and ourselves to continue in our wonderful free society. Sorry for the lengthy response.
** llydiabeato**, first of all welcome to the Straight Dope !
You said
( My Bolding )
This is a board of rigorous precision ( most of the time…) and so I take umbrage with one KEY element, the words I bolded out. This was not in fact an emergency by any normal definition of the word. It may have been a dire effort to save a dying person. It was not a violent trauma, it was not a Golden Hour Emergency. The Head Surgeon had MORE than ample time to find out the answer to this most key of questions.
He did not do this. Instead, he abrogated his responsibility to his patient and corrupted her bloodstream, guaranteeing her death. You cannot survive with another blood type in your body. Simple fact.
It wasn’t an emergency surgery. But, you know what? If it was somehow, that Head Surgeon would be EVERY bit as culpable. If the donor was 45 minutes away, and the girl was truly an emergency admission from a far off land, and it was a Hollywood day, where split second airflights overseas co-incide with the brain death of the perfect donor, and the Head Surgeon really DID have the Golden Hour in mind…he still had two chances to verify, and did not either time.
Negligence in the face of a true Trauma situation is, I would WAG, astonishingly hard to prove. In this case? Piece of cake, sadly.