Tag: organ donation
Teen won’t survive after trying viral ‘choking game’: mom
A heartbroken mother in Indiana is preparing for the death of her teenage son after he was gravely injured while replicating a “choking game” that he saw on social media, she said Sunday.
Joann Jackson Bogard, of Evansville, said something went “horribly wrong” when her son, Mason, tried to temporarily asphyxiate himself late Wednesday after seeing the practice of self-strangulation or assisted strangulation online.
“The challenge is based on the idea that you choke yourself to the point of almost passing out and then stop,” Bogard wrote in a Facebook post Sunday. “It’s supposed to create a type of high. Unfortunately, it has taken the lives of many young people too early and it will take our precious Mason.”
Bogard thanked doctors at Deaconess Hospital for doing everything they could to save her son, who was critically injured. The family is now preparing to donate the teen’s organs, she said.
“While we are devastated that we will never experience so many things with Mason again, we are able to find some comfort in the fact that Mason will save the lives of others,” Bogard’s post continued. “He would have wanted it this way. He was an extremely generous young man.”
Bogard also warned other parents to monitor what their children view on social media, despite concerns that they may be a bit overprotective.
“Unfortunately, we will not have the opportunity to experience so many things with our child because of a stupid challenge on social media,” Bogard wrote.
Bogard could not be reached for comment Monday. In a subsequent post late Sunday, Bogard said Mason still had fluid in his lungs.
“Please pray that he continues to improve his lung function to give his recipient the best lungs possible,” the post read. “He has already surpassed expectations and is almost there. He is still showing us how strong he is!”
A message seeking comment from Evansville police was not immediately returned.
Eighty-two children between ages 6 and 19 died after playing the so-called choking game between 1995 and 2007, according to the Evansville Courier & Press, citing a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report with the agency’s most recent statistics.
Seventy-one of the victims were male and the average age was just over 13, according to the 2008 report, which noted that serious neurological injury or death can result if strangulation is prolonged.
The earliest known death due to the stunt took place in 1995, with three or fewer deaths following in each year between 1995 and 2004. A total of 22 deaths were recorded in 2005, followed by 35 fatalities in 2006, according to the CDC report.
And among the 42 deaths in which sufficient details were reported, 92 percent of the victim’s parents said they didn’t know about the choking game until their child died, the report found.
“Hug your children, tell them you love them,” Bogard’s initial post concluded. “Enjoy every moment and let the little issues go.”
via: https://nypost.com/2019/05/06/teen-wont-survive-after-trying-viral-choking-game-mom/
Photo Credit: nypost.com/facebook
1st Living HIV-Positive Organ Donor Wants To Lift ‘The Shroud Of HIV Related Stigma’
Article via NPR
Nina Martinez just became the world’s first living HIV-positive organ donor.
In a medical breakthrough, surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital late last month successfully transplanted one of her kidneys to a recipient who is also HIV positive.
“I feel wonderful,” Martinez, 35, said in an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, 11 days into her recovery. The patient who received her kidney has chosen to remain anonymous, but is doing well, Martinez is told.
“They’re doing wonderfully and they got an organ they desperately needed to get and that’s all I could ask for,” Martinez said.
HIV advocates are celebrating the achievement as an important step towards lifting the stigma around a disease that affects some 1.1 million Americans. In 2017, an estimated 18 patients died each day while waiting for an organ transplant. Many of these deaths involved HIV positive patients who have traditionally had access to a much smaller pool of potential organ donors.
The decision to donate
Martinez contracted HIV through a blood transfusion when she was an infant in the early 1980s.
“I do think that my lack of discomfort in talking about HIV does make people more comfortable with the idea, and I do attribute that to being diagnosed at such a young age,” she said. “I didn’t know HIV was supposed to be something that I was ashamed of.”
She said she first looked into becoming a donor last year, when Johns Hopkins became the first hospital in the United States to announce plans to perform organ transplants for HIV patients from donors who are HIV positive. Previously, doctors had only transplanted organs to HIV-positive recipients from deceased HIV donors.
“Like most living kidney donors, I did start this process for a friend that I knew who needed a kidney,” said Martinez.
Then her friend died in November, when Martinez was in the middle of a rigorous evaluation process. “I knew that this was a lot of medical spending not to try and do something with,” she said. So Johns Hopkins found another recipient.
Explaining why she felt compelled to share her story, Martinez pointed to when Johns Hopkins performed the first transplants from deceased HIV-positive donors to two anonymous patients in 2016.
“It was important to me to be able to put a name and a face to that story to show that the need for HIV-positive organs is real and actually benefits everybody,” she said. “My taking somebody off the deceased donor waitlist who is HIV positive means that everyone moves up the waitlist whether they’re HIV positive or not.”
Currently, more than 113,000 people in the U.S. — including those living with HIV — are waiting to receive an organ transplant, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS).
A years-long drive
Last month’s surgery marked the culmination of a years-long drive to expand access to organ donors for patients with HIV.
In 2016, UNOS gave Johns Hopkins approval to carry out the first transplant from an HIV positive donor to an HIV positive patient, capping a two-year push by Martinez’s surgeon, Dorry Segev, to legalize such procedures.
Before that, Segev, an associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, helped draft the HIV Organ Policy Equity Act signed by President Obama in 2013. The measure reversed a 1988 law preventing doctors from procuring HIV-infected organs regardless of the recipient’s HIV status.
Segev, speaking with NPR in 2016, said he was motivated to address the “antiquated law” when he saw that the need for organ transplants among HIV patients had swelled since the start of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
Segev said he grew frustrated as he watched potentially life-saving organs going to waste. In one 2011 study, he and his colleagues projected that an estimated 500 to 600 would-be organ donors with HIV die each year. Had they been allowed to donate while they were alive, they could have been saving more than 1,000 lives annually.
“We were throwing away organs that were infected with HIV that could be used to help people with HIV,” Segev said.
Today, an HIV diagnosis is no longer the death sentence it once was. “People live their lives with it,” said Segev. “They just need to take antiretroviral medication.”
But patients who use those antiretroviral treatments — along with other drugs used to treat the disease — are also at higher risks of kidney and liver failure and often end up on the organ waiting list.
Keeping transplants safe
Given the risk of kidney disease that’s associated with HIV, the medical community has until relatively recently considered it unsafe to leave a would-be donor with just one kidney.
But newer medications are thought to be both more effective and safer, and to guard against potential complications, Martinez was made to go through months of rigorous testing to ensure success for her and her recipient.
“They determined that my future risk of kidney disease was really, really, small,” Martinez said.
Martinez hopes her visibility and openness about her disease encourages others to realize they can be a part of advanced new treatments that allow HIV-positive people to live a healthy life.
“I hope that people who are not living with HIV who wouldn’t normally consider themselves to be potential living kidney donors would actually consider it in earnest, as well as people living with HIV who are on great treatment.”
NPR’s Emma Talkoff produced this story for broadcast.