edit: He had a major head wound from a construction accident. He was lucid when they brought him in. He slipped into a coma and never recovered. He was an organ donor – they retrieved eyes and I think some skin but no organs.
new edit: From a google search, it appears it has to do with oxygen depletion. During the dying process the patient’s blood pressure drops. Long periods of low blood pressure can damage organs due to lack of blood flow. For this reason, organ donation can only go ahead if the patient dies within 90 minutes after withdrawal of life support organ donation can go ahead.
This was absolutely tragic to learn. He would have wanted to help people even if he wasn’t there to see it.
Comments
There are many reasons why organs may be unfit for donation, we’d need a lot more information to take a guess why.
Are you sure he was an organ donor?
Do you mean after life support was removed but before they died? Because they weren’t dead yet. Despite persistent, harmful rumors hospitals don’t kill you to harvest your organs.
After death it might depend on factors of health that could impact the organs that you weren’t aware of, or could be that their next of kin objected.
Medications or certain illnesses prevent donor viability outside of research.
There could be a variety of reasons.
If they had an actively spreading cancer when they died; if they had HIV or some other infectious disease; if they left instructions or if someone in charge of decision making decided not to donate.
The organs may not have been “perfectly fine” – but they weren’t able to (or chose not to) share the reasons why they weren’t.
Eyes and the skin ARE organs.
His organs were likely not usable or needed at just that moment. Organs have an incredibly short shelf life once they’re out of the body, so unless there was a match ready and waiting within a certain distance, there’s no point.
At a guess, he was probably experiencing organ failure during the time he was breathing on his own.
They did harvest his organs; just what they needed and could use at the time. Skin and eyes are both organs.
They don’t take your heart, kidney, lungs and liver and just keep them on ice until they’re needed. If a patient needs one locally right then and there then they can take those things and use them, otherwise it sounds like skin and eyes were all they could use immediately.
There are 2 different categories of organ donors those who are “donation after circulatory death” (DCD) and “donation after brain death” (DBD).
In a lot of ways DBD leads to higher quality organs because they can keep the person on life support right up until the time they harvest the organs. It sounds like your friend did not necessarily meet the qualifications for brain death, which means in order to be a donor he would have had to have been a DCD donor.
In the case of DCD donors, organs often suffer damage during the period of time that it takes for someone’s heart and lungs to fully stop functioning, and they have to wait for a person’s heart to completely stop functioning before they can harvest organs.
While eyes and skin may not seem like huge donations from the outside looking in, skin donation can be life saving for people who have suffered major burns and wounds, and eye donation can very much be life changing. I hope you can take some comfort in the fact that he still did positively impact others with this final gift that came out of this tragedy.
I’ve only ever had one “Hollywood coma” in my years of critical care nursing and withdrawal of care (where despite the removal of life support, the patient maintained adequate respiration and oxygenation) to eventually be transferred to the ward to die.
It was surreal, and really is the exception to the rule.
Breathing is both voluntary (you can make yourself breathe faster, or hold your breath) as well as involuntary (brain stem).
So whilst MRI, EEG and our “brain death” testing like ice water into the ear canal can show extensive hypoxic injury, no meaningful response – the only patients “guaranteed” to not have a period of breathing when life support is withdrawn are those who have had brain stem death (we call it “coning”) where injured brain has nowhere to swell except downward to the stem/spinal cord junction.
I’m really sad that your friend was unable to donate their organs in accordance with their wishes. And I’m sorry for your loss.
So here’s the problem, he was breathing for several hours right? But was he breathing WELL? Were his lungs working well? Was his blood properly oxygenated?
If he was still breathing but his body was gradually shutting down, that means his organs may have gradually stopped working allowing for toxins to build up in them. Can’t give someone a new liver if the liver you have is full of toxins.
That’s why they have that time limit… you just can’t be sure about the quality of the organs you are harvesting.
This is why a significant portion of organ donations come from fatal injuries like gunshot wounds or car accidents, something that killed the person quick while potentially leaving the organs undamaged. Broke your neck in a car accident? Those kidneys could still be mint condition.