PS it may have been some reason other than age. It was a long time ago, and I don’t remember the details exactly.
It was a young girl who needed new lungs. She did get her transplant but if I recall she died of complications.
You are correct about the patient being a girl. As I said in my next post, it was a long time ago and my memory is not great now.
I wonder if they will ever be able to transplant memory parts of the brain, without also transplanting the personality? Be a good cure for alzheimers if they can.
Depending on the organs, they can be split for several patients. I’ve heard of that done for both lungs and livers; for a heart it wouldn’t be possible.
Update: kid got his heart, was doing well as of October.
I’m glad he is doing ok, I hope he still is.
I am wondering, media intervention aside, how often a transplant board would initially say no, to scare a teen into compliance, then later say yes. It is so common for teens to feel invincible, and if the heart problems hit him suddenly, it could have taken a wake-up call of a “no” to make him understand.
As anybody knows, getting mixed up with the wrong crowd does not get one a police record: it is what one does when with that crowd.
What indication do you have about the rest of the waiting list and any crimes that need bringing to light? If they have records, I suspect that the medical board would take that into account.
ISTM that needing a heart transplant in the first place is about as big a wake up call as one could hope for.
I wonder if they were able to harvest any of his organs.
This is not the first time I’ve seen a patient throw away his 2nd chance at life (via organ transplant) by bad behavior that was pretty damn predictable based on prior behavior.
So it goes.
So much for having a change of heart.
golf clap
Well, it looks like one side pretty clearly won this debate.
I saw this while perusing the news this morning and was surprised by how viscerally angry it made me. Transplant committees have to make some extremely difficult decisions that some might see as cruel or draconian. They take a ton of factors into consideration, and they need to keep to the same decision-making process for everyone or else it isn’t fair.
That they made one determination for this kid based on that exacting process, then reversed themselves because a bunch of bleeding heart laymen with no actual knowledge of the full facts of the situation or of transplant medicine started screeching about it in the media had me very upset at the time. If there is one area that public pressure should never come to bear on, it’s these sorts of decision-making processes. That it has ended like this, indicating that their original decision to deny based on risk factors was well-founded, makes me sick. Whether there’s some poor HLHS kid out there with a failed Fontan who died while this kid got the heart doesn’t bear thinking about.
First they tried to kill him by denying him a heart, and now they had the cops take him out.
He was so victimized by the Man.
They tried to make him a better person…
I guess his heart just wasn’t in it.
his heart for sure wasn’t in it.
I’d be really happy if the people who bulldozed the decision and took it to the media, got a bill for both the transplant and the disaster that happened today.
I just wanted to go on record that I have known teenagers as young as 14 completely in charge of their diabetic regimens, and teenagers, on the ketogenic diet, who prepared it, and stuck to it even at school, teens who took medication for various conditions, and were very responsible, teens with disabilities who handled themselves in public school even with needing to work with note-takers and resource teachers, and still made the honor role, including one kid who got up on his own every morning and made his own breakfast and lunch, and then cooked dinner for himself and his father every night, because his father got up at five every morning for a commute, and didn’t get home until after six.
There needs to be some kind of word that encompasses how both tragic and stupid this was, but this kid does not represent all teenagers.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. And confusing an anecdote with data.
The people who were “right” in this thread were advocating that compassion should not be a factor in the decision. Yet it was their own inability to have compassion for criminals that was factored into their decision. The first post was calling the guy scum, an emotional, non-detached reaction. Seems they want compassion to be considered, given to everyone but certain people.
Considering someone’s criminal behavior is not relevant. Most criminals do not wind up killing themselves through their actions. Supposedly, at 15, this kid had one criminal thing on his record. He was not on track to be the kind that killed himself, even if he remained a criminal.
If you want to remove compassion, then you have to remove the ability to judge whether this person is the type of person you approve of. The sole issue is whether or not the heart will be wasted.
He was, again, near the top of the list. His risk factor for death may have been higher due to being a criminal, but there’s no way it would completely pull him off the list.
The only relevant factor is whether the heart will go to waste, and it doesn’t go to waste if the person survives. Basing it on whether you like the person should never be a factor.
Finally, if going to the media gets a decision reversed, that means that the consensus morality is against that decision, and thus the original decision was immoral. Morality, absent some God from on high, is ultimately about what society thinks is moral. It’s just the social contract.