this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
309 points (93.3% liked)

Canada

7236 readers
496 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories


πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


πŸ’» Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


πŸ’΅ Finance, Shopping, Sales


πŸ—£οΈ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I donated a kidney to a friend earlier this year. The reason his kidneys failed wasn't anything he was at fault for, but even if it had been because of poor decisions he'd made in the past, I still would have given him one of mine. Because people deserve second chances. I can understand not wanting to give a recovering alcoholic a deceased donor's liver, when someone else could receive that liver, instead. But this woman's partner was a match and was willing to donate to her. What's the harm in that? That isn't a liver that could have gone to someone else who needed it. It's a donation that would have either gone to her or no one else. No one could have lost out of the donation had been carried out. This was just cruelty, and now someone is dead. And for what? Because there's a 15% chance (according to studies the article mentioned) that she might have started drinking again???

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's not super clear, but the article makes it sound like if a partial graft from a live donor fails, then the recipient is automatically fast tracked for a new transplant from a deceased donor.

If that's the case then maybe policy should be changed in the case of alcohol abuse.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The policy isn't there just to be extra nice, it's because otherwise the patient dies without a liver.

Since she was too sick for a partial liver transplant, and not eligible for a dead donor full liver transplant, she would have just died.

It might seem cruel but the same is done for a lot of other procedures; if the chance of you dying in surgery is way too high, doctors won't take the risk, they're not executioners.

It's not a moral judgement about her alcoholism, the same would have been true if she had a cancer no surgeon would take on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I totally understand the mortality aspect, I was just thinking if a patient is 100% going to die from liver failure without a transplant, any chance to live from a live donor seems worth it. Of course I don't know any statistics so I have nothing to base it on.

Maybe euthanasia should be a legal option instead of a slow agonizing death that puts next of kin into medical debt.

[–] Kecessa 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Surgeon time is precious as well.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

In the article, it shows that the hospital spent significantly more slowly letting her die than the average cost of the transplant.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

The comparison is apples and oranges. They only include the cost of the surgery itself, not the cost of after-surgical care, the potential cost of complications to both the patient and the donor, etc. Then there's the cost if the partial liver donation doesn't take, or if the patient relapses.

Obviously, there's also a lot of potential upside to having the patient survive, I just don't think the odds of that were all that high.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So let the free market sort out the organ redistribution problem!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm a free market entrepreneur and I'd like to solve your organ shortage and homeless problem all at once.