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Last hours of an organ donor
In the liminal time when the brain is dead but organs are kept alive, there is an urgent tenderness to medical care
When the definition of death changed in the late 1960s, making it possible for a person to be ‘brain dead’ but with organs still very much alive and available for donation, a bridge appeared and a sixth class was created in the early 1980s. I mean something submerged in the rushing stream of my blood, memory as a living organ in which every feeling experienced that day retains its natural essence, its original intensity, its primary historical form. So it was in the 1990s, when the rise of managed care promised greater efficiency at less cost, and a ‘win-win’ strategy anchored in preventive medicine, led to a patient rebellion against being treated like cattle, including their inability to choose their own doctor, and rushed visits to practitioners ‘on the plan’.
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