![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The mind boggles
Mar. 27th, 2006 03:10 pmI'm forced to teach an English conversation class at the city hospital. I prepared some discussion materials late last year about the French woman who'd received the world's first face transplant. The discussion went on from there to the broader topic of organ donation.
"Are you an organ donor?" one of the doctors asked me.
"Yes, of course," I said, and showed him my American driver's licence. And as Kurt Vonnegut would say - get this: the six doctors (including a surgeon and two OBGYNs) were horrified. After I'd convinced them I wasn't joking, that is. Upon further probing, I discovered that while five of the six were hypothetically willing to receive someone's donated organs, none of them were willing to donate themselves.
My prefecture made the news today when the family of a brain dead patient approved the harvesting of said patient's organs for the forty-second organ transplant in the history of the country.
Now, I don't know much about the history of organ donation, but I imagine enough time has elapsed between the development of the technique and the present for a few more than forty of the procedures to have taken place in Japan. And yet the concept is apparently so odious to the public at large that the family asked the news not to reveal the name, age, or gender of the donor. Compare this with the atitude in the west, where women's magazines are full of interviews with surviving family members talking lionizing the choice of their deceased loved ones to help others post-mortem.
That will be all.
"Are you an organ donor?" one of the doctors asked me.
"Yes, of course," I said, and showed him my American driver's licence. And as Kurt Vonnegut would say - get this: the six doctors (including a surgeon and two OBGYNs) were horrified. After I'd convinced them I wasn't joking, that is. Upon further probing, I discovered that while five of the six were hypothetically willing to receive someone's donated organs, none of them were willing to donate themselves.
My prefecture made the news today when the family of a brain dead patient approved the harvesting of said patient's organs for the forty-second organ transplant in the history of the country.
Now, I don't know much about the history of organ donation, but I imagine enough time has elapsed between the development of the technique and the present for a few more than forty of the procedures to have taken place in Japan. And yet the concept is apparently so odious to the public at large that the family asked the news not to reveal the name, age, or gender of the donor. Compare this with the atitude in the west, where women's magazines are full of interviews with surviving family members talking lionizing the choice of their deceased loved ones to help others post-mortem.
That will be all.
