Organ donation

I wanted to see the surgeons that were going to carry out the operation and [the donor coordinator / specialist nurse] said to me, “Oh, perhaps I haven’t explained things for you. Is there anything you’re not sure about…” I said, “No.” It was very, very important for me to see the surgeons, because I needed to tell them...how special John was.

Yeah...Yeah I had to tell them and [the donor coordinator / specialist nurse] was, [the donor coordinator] was fine. I don’t know that anybody had actually ever actually asked to see a surgeon before. But for me I just needed, there were a couple of messages that I needed to get across.

And a little while before, because we were quite a few hours from when the decision had been made. And the decisions had been made that John would become a donor, there were several hours, you know if it was midday, in the day time, it was actually at 8 o’clock the surgeons arrived in the evening, so it was that sort of time in between.

And it felt like a bit of a dream for a lot of those hours. It wasn’t really real until I was told they’d arrived. And then the reality kicked in. We’d said our goodbyes to John privately, individually, which was a fantastic thing that the co-ordinators did, allowed his sister’s time, and me time, and [my son] time just to sort of say our goodbyes privately. And then when the surgeons, when the time was getting closer and closer, that he would come off the life support machine, as I say I just needed to see the surgeon.

And we met in the corridor outside of where John was taken to. And this man let me tell him for sort of probably only five minutes, but he allowed me to tell him how special my husband was; that I needed him to be treated with respect. And they needed to take care of him because it was going to be out of my hands. I couldn’t do anymore. But it was so important for me. I felt like I was sort of speaking on behalf of John to, you know, yeah well, do you know what, I’m giving these organs up but I’m still a human being. I’m still a husband and a father, and all of that.
 

Sandra' It’s very traumatic because as Craig said you’re taken away, I mean I knew Rachel was going, I knew it was the ventilator, but Craig was still seeing his daughter still breathing, still warm I think. And we were signing these kind of things, these forms, and that is a difficult thing that parents or families might find difficult. That is something maybe they should be aware of, that.

Craig' Or that’s sort of, I certainly felt guilty for leaving her that night because looking back on her and she’s still breathing and we could stay if we wanted to, but I think we’d had...

Sandra' More [son’s name].

Craig'  Oh well my son was there, and, you know actually we were mentally and physically drained, there was nothing left in us. But I felt so guilty and it wasn’t till a couple of days later that the transplant co-ordinator [specialist nurse] was up, and she said, “I got the minister came round.” We’re not religious in anyway, but the school minister was up with us, and Rachel and the school minister knew each other.

Sandra'  Rachel worshipped him.

Craig' And he said, “Oh I’ll,” and she said, “Oh it was good the minister came back up.” And we said we didn’t know he’d came back up and he sat with her until they took her to theatre, and it was hours and hours. And I still can’t thank him enough for that. You know, he just sat with her holding her hand and just chatting away, that was the nice thing. The nice guy he was, but I still feel quite guilty for leaving her that day.

Although I was given the opportunity to stay but I just wanted to stay with everybody else.

Sandra' It’s difficult to say, I can understand as I say, I think I was torn as well but I’d got my nurses head on, and obviously my mother’s head on. And I knew she wasn’t there. It was the machine. But, as I say, it’s difficult to walk away and see. She just looked as though she was sleeping apart from the tube obviously from the ventilator keeping her going, she just looked as though she was sleeping.

Craig' I can understand why they’ve got to do it because it buys them a lot of time, rather than having to rush and get things going. It gives them a lot of time to set out to find proper recipients and to get the best possible match they can get and I can understand why, but I found that so hard.

Sandra' And I think families should be aware of that, that they do, that they’ll come and test them, brain stem death, and say that they’ve actually gone. When you’re looking at them, they look as though they’re still there. They’re warm to touch, there’s still a heart beat because everything...

Craig' They’re not dead.

Sandra' You know, everything, the machines are keeping everything going and it’s heart wrenching because you still think your relatives there.
 

They did the brain tests on the Wednesday. And then obviously they came back that he was brain dead. And they also said with the machine, I remember them saying to the kids on the Tuesday, that the only reason your Dad’s chest is going up and down at the same time as the machine is because the machine is pumping it in for him. And so if the machine weren’t pumping up and down, Dad’s chest wouldn’t be pumping up and down. So you kind of grasp some knowledge from that, from listening to the nurses with the kids.

So all of his family and his friends, they all went and they were given a chance to say ta ra to him and say what they wanted to say and do or whatever. And then it came to my turn. Well obviously I was the last one in, and it was like I had this vision in my head that that you’d go in and they’d turn the machine off and his chest would stop going up and down and obviously he’d die. So that’s it, you know he died, you can hold his hand, you can say goodbye. And he’d die.

But obviously with organ co-ordination, organ donation, that doesn’t happen because they have to keep your blood flow going and they have to keep your chest pumping up and down. And they have to keep you warm and your organs alive to harvest them. But I didn’t realise that. And it was a bit of a shock to go into the room and the nurses said, “Well we can’t, you don’t turn the machine off because if you turn the machine off, then Rick’s body and his organs will die. And then we wouldn’t be able to harvest them.”

And I think that if any co-ordinators [specialist nurses] or doctors are listening to this, that’s something that they ought to, I don’t know whether it’s changed in the last ten years already, but I think that that’s something that they need to, with family, close family, and when you’re discussing these things, you need to tell them. Because that haunted me. It’s haunted me for the last ten years. I couldn’t believe that I had to do that. You turn around and you walk away but to me he was still warm and his chest was still going up and down, so therefore he was still alive.

So you’re asking questions like, “Well is this decision too early, even though you’ve had the information from the doctors and they’ve done the tests, and you know they’ve gone through their procedure, which is a legal and proper procedure. You still, as that man’s wife, I still thought that I was sending my husband into an operating theatre and they were going to take his organs out and he was alive. And that’s a hard thing to live with.
 

Tom' There is a point I would make here, that since then I’ve been asked many times, “Well there’s no difference between losing any loved one, and whether organ donation’s involved or not.” And looking back you think that’s not true. I knew the minute it was mentioned that in this particular case we would have to have, or give the final decision. Not so much about organ donation, but whether to switch the life support system off. And that involves you in their death. That brings you culpable with their death. Because you never know is he dead? They do the brain stem tests. And you sit there and you see John laying in bed, occasionally moving, and you want so hard to believe he’s going to open his eyes any minute.

And I remember thinking, “If it comes to the time of switching off, would I have the courage and could I ask that I did the switching off?” I bottled out on that. But that was for me. For Catherine it would have been a thousand times worse, and you live with that the rest of your life. You are never sure.

And we remember and I remember how this has affected Catherine, a case in France where somebody had been in a coma for eight years, and then he woke up. How the hell do you deal with that? Yet all the facts were there, everything’s there. You know logically everything, but deep down you think did I do the right thing?
 

It was on the Tuesday evening that the operation went ahead. And Kristian was taken down for his operation at about six o’clock and, at about five o’clock, we all went in and really said our goodbyes. And we expressed a wish to see him after the operation. Because I think we all needed in our minds to confirm that he had died. Because he looked so well in himself up until really the end. It was very hard to take on board that he had died because he’d still got a rosy glow to his skin. He was still very warm and all the rest of it. And so we requested that we see his body afterwards and that in itself was incredibly traumatic, although I don’t regret it for a moment.

It was unfortunate for us that we went back to the hospital at about midnight. And we had to wait for about another hour before we could see him. And we were told that he would be in the chapel of rest. We’d been told that earlier in the evening. But we were taken, run round to the back of the hospital, which in the dark it all looked very dingy and gloomy and horrible. And there was like a boiler room there. I seem to remember all this noise coming out of this one area. And we were taken into what was almost like a store room. And that shocked me greatly, I think all of us really. I mean they’d done the best that they could do; we were never given an explanation as to why he hadn’t been in the chapel of rest.

And they’d put a few candles around and he just looked very peaceful, but where he’d been put was very traumatic for us. And it was so important to see him at that point. I think I touched him and I don’t know why I should think that, but I was still expecting him to be slightly warm and he wasn’t. He was stone cold. Now that was a huge shock. And very distressing. But I don’t regret having done that.
 

I remember asking the funeral director whether I would be able to see him. I felt I wanted to see him because the problem is, when your loved one is a donor, you actually don’t see them die as such. You don’t have this, where you watch their last breath and then you sit with them afterwards.

When we said goodbye to Martin on the ICU he was actually still pink and warm and just looked like he was asleep. And so that’s actually very hard for a lot of people to accept that death has happened. And so I was one of those that needed to accept that was real. 

And so we wanted to go and see him at the funeral parlour. But I was also very concerned at what he was going to look like. But the funeral director assured me that I would see nothing. Because, as I said, before he’s looked after just in the way any other surgery is, so the wounds are dressed exactly the same way, as small as possible. And obviously we took his clothes to the funeral parlour so we weren’t able to see anything horrible.
 

It was still difficult. At the point he died and we were still in the room because we were within a quarter of an hour of it being too late for them to do it. They had to take him more or less straight away, and that was really difficult. I wanted to say, “No, no.” I really felt when they were wheeling him out of the room, part of me wanted to say, “No, don’t.” But I knew, I knew it was right to do it. So I just let them take him.

Yeah, that was very difficult. I’ve got to admit it’s not easy at that point. Especially as Paul had been, he wasn’t being kept alive. He wasn’t brain dead and being kept alive by a breathing tube. If the tube stayed in he was alive and aware of what had been going on around him all day. He died because they took the tube out, so it was a different scenario to some other families where you know there’s nobody there anymore.

I did notice, it’s funny, maybe it doesn’t seem the right thing to have done, but when we went to see him in the undertakers, I looked at what had actually been done, and everything was all dressed as a wound would be as if you were living. You could see, and they’d even removed his catheter during the surgery as well, that he’d had a, you know for the last ten years. And they removed that and everything was all dressed properly. And he had been treated with dignity.

You felt reassured when you saw,

Yeah. We did.