This Is Why I'm Not An Organ Donor

[Tigermike 3,053]

I just don't want there to be any reason for my death to be sped up or facilitated in some way by doctors who think someone else will be better off with what I have when there's a medical crisis. And as long as prisoners are receiving state and federally funded organ transplants, there's no way I would even consider being an organ donor unless I or my family or friends could at the very least control who the organs go to.

Doctor Accused of Killing Patient to Harvest Organs

Tuesday , July 31, 2007

The lawyer for a surgeon charged with prescribing excessive drugs to a disabled patient to speed up his death and harvest his organs says his client has been the subject of a "witch hunt."

Prosecutors in San Luis Obispo County said Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, 33, of San Francisco, gave a harmful drug and prescribed excessive doses of morphine and a sedative to 26-year-old Ruben Navarro, who died in 2006.

Roozrokh was charged Monday in the first such criminal case against a transplant doctor in the U.S., the county district attorney's office said.

M. Gerald Schwartzbach, Roozrokh's lawyer, called the charges "unfounded and ill-advised," saying his client "has unfairly been the subject of an 18-month witch hunt."

"Nothing that Dr. Roozrokh did or said at the hospital that night adversely affected the quality of Mr. Navarro's life or contributed to Mr. Navarro's eventual death," Schwartzbach said in a statement.

Roozrokh planned to surrender and post $10,000 bail, Schwartzbach said.

Navarro was taken in a coma to Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, 150 miles northwest of Los Angeles, in 2006 after suffering respiratory and cardiac arrest. Although Navarro was found to have irreversible brain damage and was kept on a respirator, he was not considered brain dead because he still had limited brain function.

The day before Navarro died, his family gave approval for a surgical team to recover his organs for donation. That didn't happen, however, because Navarro didn't die within 30 minutes of being removed from life support. He died a day later.

Roozrokh, a surgeon at Kaiser Permanente's now-closed kidney transplant program, was working at the time on behalf of a group that procures and distributes organs. The prosecutor's office said in a statement that the drugs were prescribed "to accelerate Mr. Navarro's death in order to recover his organs."

State law prohibits transplant surgeons from being involved in the treatment of potential organ donors before they are declared dead.

Prosecutors did not pursue murder charges because witnesses said they did not believe the drugs caused Navarro's death.

The coroner's office this year determined Navarro died of natural causes. Last month, his mother, Rosa, filed a wrongful-death and medical malpractice lawsuit against Roozrokh and others, claiming her son was removed from life support without her permission and given lethal doses of drugs.

Navarro, who weighed about 80 pounds, was born with a neurological disorder known as adrenoleukodystrophy. He also had cerebral palsy and seizures.

Roozrokh was charged with felony counts of dependent adult abuse, administering a harmful substance and unlawful controlled substance prescription. If convicted of all three counts, he faces up to eight years in state prison or up to one year in jail and a $20,000 fine as a condition of probation.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,291527,00.html

Go to a Muslim doctor at your own risk. After all they are the Religion of Piece(s)

[aumd03 2]

I respect your opinion most of the time, but here you are wrong. First of all, your last line comes across as being extremely xenophobic.

Even the prosecution admits that his actions did not cause the patients death. And the coroner stated he died of natural causes.

He may be guilty of treating a trasnplant patient before procurement.

People toss around terms like "brain dead but with limited brain function". Its misleading. He was brain dead, his brainstem was still alive, to help him breathe and regulate his heart rate, but he had no higher order brain function.

You obviously haven't spent a lot of time around people in a permanent vegetative state if you believe you will have a better life with "what you have" rather than someone with the potential for a full life getting it. Its stories like this that make people fearful of being organ donor. It is a difficult line to tread because you can't let the patient's heart stop or stop breathing because of damage to the organs, but people aren't comfortable calling someone dead until they stop breathing and their heart stops on its own.

[CCTAU 3,342]

Achnod did little Reebok a favor. Sign up now to be a donor. I promise when you die, you'll be a shoe-in as a donor. Just ask little Reebok.

[otterinbham 0]

Hmmmm...one unethical doctor among hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of people are saved every year through donated organs. Do I detect a whiff of rampant paranoia?

I just hope you don't have a loved one in dire need of an organ transplant anytime soon.

[Guest Tigrinum Major]

I'm not going to eat an apple, because eventually it will be a core.

[TexasTiger 13,006]

I don't own an organ, but I'm thinking of leaving my piano to charity.

BTW, why is a music thread on the political forum?

[quietfan 233]

Organ donation should, of course, be a personal choice. And everyone should have a living will and informed next-of-kin to clearly establish the degree of artificial life support they wish to experience.

For myself, I will continue to be an organ donor...just as I will continue to give to charities even though some are corrupt; will continue to give blood even though some of it may go to a criminal; will continue to pay my taxes even if some of them are misused; and will even keep giving my old clothes to Good Will without paranoid prejudice that perhaps a Muslim or other person of different ethnicity might end up wearing them.

I fail to see how one story of one bad apple is in any way an indictment of the organ donor system and/or any particular religious group. Unfortunately, such a story may result in an even scarcer supply of badly needed transplant organs. That may be a side effect that Dr. Roozrokh didn't think of (if he is guilty of any of the charges)--IF he did this, in the long run he may cost more lives than he saved by discouraging others from donating.

[CCTAU 3,342]

Organ donation should, of course, be a personal choice. And everyone should have a living will and informed next-of-kin to clearly establish the degree of artificial life support they wish to experience.

For myself, I will continue to be an organ donor...just as I will continue to give to charities even though some are corrupt; will continue to give blood even though some of it may go to a criminal; will continue to pay my taxes even if some of them are misused; and will even keep giving my old clothes to Good Will without paranoid prejudice that perhaps a Muslim or other person of different ethnicity might end up wearing them.

I fail to see how one story of one bad apple is in any way an indictment of the organ donor system and/or any particular religious group. Unfortunately, such a story may result in an even scarcer supply of badly needed transplant organs. That may be a side effect that Dr. Roozrokh didn't think of (if he is guilty of any of the charges)--IF he did this, in the long run he may cost more lives than he saved by discouraging others from donating.

I agree. As the brother of a kidney transplant recipient, I just can't see NOT being a donor. The last thing we can all do as we leave this earth is give another human being a chance to live....

[Ranger12 46]

This is exactly why I am an organ donor:

Link

HARTSELLE — Tell Rocky Gillespie dreams don't come true, that there's no such thing as a miracle carpet ride. Then hear his story.

Picture him lying face down and praying on red carpet at Calvary Assembly of God, an oxygen tank strapped to his back, plastic tubing stretching into his nostrils so he can breathe.

That was April Fool's Day, as the Hartselle man, 33, continued his lifelong battle against cystic fibrosis, which doctors said should have killed him as an infant.

Even though he doubted, he said, God reminded him that day about his dream, a year earlier at The University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital.

"My dream was about being on red carpet and being healed in front of a large church," he said. "God told me to have faith and to start telling people I'm healed, even though it hasn't manifested."

In August 2006, with his pulmonary functions declining, a doctor told him he should be on a transplant list. He had six to eight months to live.

He came home to his wife, Tara, and stepson Blaine Williams, 10, but lost sight of a lot of things, he said, including family and what God had called him to do. He had shut people out and quit his voluntary job as youth pastor at New Song Family Church.

He spent most of the following October at UAB as his condition worsened.

"I couldn't walk, and I couldn't breathe. I had to crawl to the bathroom," he said. "I balked at the transplant, which would be both lungs, a rarity. I thought I could make it with treatments."

He came home to be with his stepson for Halloween and his wife drove him back the next day to complete what would be a two-month stay. During November, a friend, Chris Shumake of Danville, visited and told Gillespie that God wasn't finished with him.

"Chris began to make me realize that I did have a greater purpose on this earth," he said. "That's when I started to go forward with living and get listed for a transplant."

While still at UAB, Gillespie contacted the lead singer of a band called Will To Live and told him about his plight.

"I like their music, and being a musician myself, we had a lot to talk about," Gillespie said. "He was inspiring, and I got one of their T-shirts."

Guidance from above

Late in 2006, Gillespie said, God led him and his family to Calvary. On Feb. 7, after a three-month battery of tests, he made the transplant list.

After what he calls "God's reaffirmation," he was going to be all right the day he was face down on the carpet. Gillespie said people questioned him.

"They'd say, 'Hold up a minute. You still have this (oxygen) tank with you.' I told them to just wait and see what God does in the next couple of months. I put that on my profile on MySpace."

Tara Gillespie said the family kept their bags packed, waiting for a call from the UAB transplant team. It came May 29.

"He told me that as soon as a surgeon arrived to retrieve the lungs, they would measure them and call me back," Rocky Gillespie said. "It was a match, and Tara drove Blaine and I down. We arrived about 1 p.m., and surgery started at 8:30. They finished up the next day at 12:30 a.m."

Gillespie said he recalls little of the next week because of pain medication. But soon, he was walking two laps around the unit, then 20, which was a mile.

Three weeks later, doctors released him from UAB to a nearby townhouse for another two weeks. He came home July 2, but made weekly visits for checkups.

"On July 25, my doctor told me I was doing so well, not to return for six weeks," he said. "Is it a miracle? Yeah, it's a miracle."

Gillespie said he can't describe what he feels for the donor and his family. He said he would get a chance to write them through a liaison.

"If they want to write me back, then I'll make contact," he said. "I'm working on the letter now."

And remember the red carpet in Gillespie's dream? A Calvary church official said it had been mauve, a pale lavender-lilac color.

"We dyed it red about two years ago," he said.