The Truth About Donating Organs

Being active in the funeral business, I see things that would shock the average person. One of the most shocking experiences has been seeing what condition we recieve a body in that has had organs harvested.

Up until I started in the funeral business, I was always an organ donor until an experience that had me running to the DMV to change my donor status to non-donor.

On this day I was sent to a medical facility to pick up a deceased man. His family had been waiting for his organs to be harvested so we could begin the preparation and preservation process. When I arrived at the facility, I pulled out the cot to transport the body onto and place back in my transport vehicle. Upon entering the morgue I noticed some thing peculiar about the shape of the body on the table. But I proceeded and when I placed the cot next to the body it seemed as though he had no legs. I asked the doctor what happened and he replied we harvested most of the bones from his lower body.

I was shocked! When I signed up to be an organ donor I thought they would take my heart, my lungs, my liver and my eyes; but never in a million years could I hv guessed they would take my entire pelvic bone! I would have never guessed that they were going to take the skin off my back, that they would take the skin off my legs or that they would take the veins out of my body. But that is exactly what they do.

Not only is this a traumatic experience on your loved ones body. But for me it was a traumatic experience watching our embalmer try to make the body complete again. And this is where the story gets even more weird.

Upon arriving at the funeral home we transferred the deceased onto the embalming table. I asked the embalmer, could he fix him? He looked at me and said we can fix him but it’s not gonna be easy. My curiosity let me to ask the next question, “can I watch?” He insisted that I come back after he had cleaned the body up and got some initial work done and so I agreed and one hour later I came back in the room and was astonished by the measures needed in order to reconstruct bones and body form.

In place of a pelvic bone was sawdust. Sawdust is used in the funeral business for many things but in this case it holds form pretty well and is also absorbent for purposes of leakage. In place of bones in the legs were pieces of PVC pipes and more sawdust. After sewing him up and gauzing all areas where skin was removed and placing round shape plastic eye caps in the empty sockets, the job was done.

Due to the severity of damage done to his body we had to inform the family about the condition of the body. They were also shocked to find out how much of his body was actually harvested.

After seeing that it became a regular occurrence to see what horrible things were done to the bodies of people who not only donated their organs but also donated their body to science .

My point here is people are not well informed about what it means to be an organ donor. They also don’t know that it cost the family more money to fix the body after all the organs have been harvested. Now mind you, when these organs are harvested to be placed in another humans body, they are donated to the recipient but the hospital and doctors still make A LOT of money from those many surgeries that take place off just one persons organ donation.

The LEAST these doctors n hospitals can do is pay for the funeral! The LEAST the system can do is keep it 100% real about what organ donation may entail. The system is set up to benefit hospitals doctors and patients. The system should also be set up to help the donor family.

So please talk to your loved ones, talk to your friends, and talk to anybody that you know is a donor so they fully understand what it means to be one .

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