Katie's New Face
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
Kudos to the DoD for doing this. The military historically has been the driver for advances in surgery. This will not only benefit Katie, but the knowledge gained from this will also benefit many wounded soldiers in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPtmFZqKC0
Just like the article, it isn't an easy video to watch.
He set up a plastic surgery clinic between the wars.
A relative of his, McIndoe, became famous (the better known of the two today) for his work in WW2 for pioneering and inventing many treatments for burn victims. Burns had become a common injury for pilots and aircrew. He formed the Guinea Pig Club for patients and effectively pioneered rehabilitation. He convinced the locals to visit the hospital in Sussex regularly and befriend patients. They organised trips out to the town so they could feel "normal" again (that became so common locals no longer stared), allowing a bar in the hospital, regular clothes or uniforms not PJs and countless other touches. The hospital still specialises in burns and reconstruction.
McIndoe ended up with honours from most of the Allied nations if I remember right.
Edit: More detail
McIndoe gets extensive entries both for himself and under plastic surgery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_McIndoe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_surgery#Development_of...
[1] https://www.qvh.nhs.uk/our-services/plastic-surgery-and-burn...
I think it’s safe to say your experience in Germany does not apply here.
The area has a history of coal mining that goes back for almost a thousand years. However I'm pretty sure the goal for reconstructive surgery wasn't entirely altruistic: e.g. a disabled worker is a non-worker but with some prosthetics he might still be able to do light work.
That said, I'd strongly believe the culture created by a centuries long tradition of coal mining in a single region is very different from that of 20th/21st century mining in the US.
The DoD didn't invent war. It doesn't declare war. It just fights wars.
Who sends our young people to be blown up? Our elected leadership.
So we all made this problem.
I think we need to market images of badly disfigured veterans as a tragedy instead of an honor.
- 1796 and 1797
- 1807, 1808 and 1809
- 1826
- 1828, 1829 and 1830
- 1897
- 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939 and 1940
- 1976, 1977 and 1978
- 1997
- 2000
This list counts major wars until 2016. Some of the wars led in this time were of defensive nature. This list does not account for covert operations and other, similar acts that might be considered war.
The mainland United States has not been attacked as a part of a military operation in the modern era, so the defensive claim is questionable.
I would have hoped that the Nuremberg trials had put an end to that line of thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
Yes, responsibility for the horrors of war. But not the decision to declare war.
Humans create war. It is in our nature. Every tiny effort to improve lives and perform these miracles should be cherished and encouraged, regardless of military background. It is perhaps one of the few ways we have to overcome conflict and look towards a better future.
Unfortunately, there will always be bad people and the only way to keep the innocent safe is for good people to step in and do difficult things.
Surprisingly, most of the times you don’t get bites by simply not sticking your nose into every wasp nest. Still, doing that creates enough chaos and green light to “protect by any means necessary”.
Pretty neat plan. Not sure how it ends.
And this is not specific to US, if that matters.
This was preventable.
Am I the only one to notice the events that led up to this?
1. Young girl moves multiple times due to her parent’s jobs, causing for stress and anxiety.
2. Girl finds stability and passion when she is granted an encouraging educational experience/environment at a private school where her parents both found contract jobs.
3. Parents both lost their contract jobs on the same day.
4. As a result of her parents losing their jobs, she could no longer go the school, because her parents could not afford it.
5. Her boyfriend who went to that school cheated on her.
6. She shot herself in the face.
Getting cheated on in high school happens. It’s a painful experience but it’s generally a pretty good time for it to happen, because (ideally) you’re in a secure place where you can experience pain without existential loss.
Moving is rough, but not nearly as rough as having your family morph between social classes. This sort of thing is just evil for a child. Either up or down is just awful. Neither you or your peers have any context for what is happening. You’re entirely misunderstood and feel out of place. I will not have kids unless I can be reasonably certain they won’t have to experience this. In her case, her family was never even in the social class she acclimated to. This is one seriously dirty trick, especially for a child. Obviously her family was doing everything they could for her. This was just out of their control.
To face those complex realities that define your entire world and have it thrown in your face by your boyfriend cheating on you with someone else, both of whom presumably had the security of surplus income supporting their education and social life, is really bad. But we forget how much worse this is for a child.
Children in high school are smart. They understand a lot of stuff, even the difference between rich and poor. But they should only be expected to be able to make sense of so much at a time. The whole idea of this stage is to develop a stable self-identity in an environment encouraging of education and confidence. She lost both in the blink of an eye.
And she had to face the reality that going to another school like the one where she had found passion and nourishment was all just short of not happening.
This is just one of the reasons these games we play with education funding and classism are sick. This girl did not have to be in her situation.
We love to talk about how competition motivates innovation, but it also motivates economic rollercoasters. Maybe adults can handle that, but children simply can’t. This is one disgusting way to live and kids all over America are riding this rollercoaster while their parents do everything in their mighty will to give them a stable healthy existence.
But we’ve created an America where an honest living means a shitty school and an existence no more stable than a contract job. Nobody thinks about what this does to the kids. All they see is innovation.
Or, are you trying to imply something? If so, please elaborate.
I know someone personally that attempted suicide in high-school while staying in the same social class and not having anyone cheat on him. I know several army brats that had no depression problems at all despite their social life resetting several times throughout childhood.
The way to prevent suicide is to look for the signs of depression. It's not identifying one upsetting event in a victim's life and then trying to reshape society to avoid that class of upsetting event.
Shall we make cheating illegal too?
But this kind of logic does not play well on the internet. Too easily picked apart. Needs to be concrete and ready for action.
> But we’ve created an America where an honest living means a shitty school and an existence no more stable than a contract job. Nobody thinks about what this does to the kids. All they see is innovation.
Instability is natural. Disease is natural. Starvation is natural. Death is natural. Chaos is natural.
Innovation is what gives us the degree of stability we do have. Innovation in health care, in manufacturing, in communication, in a thousand tiny things that you or I have never even contemplated.
If the complaint is that we are moving too fast to more efficient, more advanced, more productive existence, then it is a valid but welcome problem to have.
To assume that this was preventable is to assume that attempted suicides are always caused by your social situation, and not something inherently primal inside you.
Also, yet another reason why America's gun laws are stupid. She wouldn't have shot herself in England.
Also the US has gun laws and gun owners organizations, they all agree that at home, you should store your guns in a locked container.
Overdosing is dangerous, but it's less lethal than gunshot.
Falls from high places are dangerous, but it requires the person makes a plan to travel to that location which doesn't fit for the rapid onset nature of many suicide attempts. Death by falls and fracture (these include jumping in front of trains) account for a small number of deaths by suicide. So, people can do it. But they tend not to do it. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
And how is that working for them?
I am British, and have contemplated it numerous times, but the effort involved in driving to a cliff, or creating a noose, or just the worry about doing it wrong, has stopped me.
If it were as simple as (getting drunk and) pulling a trigger, I would no longer be here.
The highest suicide rates exist in countries without gun rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
Why is it people need to attack the US at every turn? Also, if she was in england, she wouldn't have had this opportunity because we lead the world in medical care.
I'm not proud to admit my initial thought was not how difficult life must be for her but rather how deformed her face was.
But then I was proud that my (our) inherent human intelligence and morality was able to put that thought aside and wonder what I could do to help her.
Lots of us can't make that leap, and it costs us.
I urge all of you with children, to please foster empathy in your little people for other people less fortunate. Children can at times say the most brutal and hurtful things - and these hurtful words or even laughter - especially for children with deformities - can be very painful.
While shocking to see the pictures in this article, I hope many (most? all?) of us feel great empathy for her or others with facial or other deformities.
Thank you for being so open about your reactions to the article.
I believe the converse - if there was a way for people to end their lives painlessly and surely (with the proper safeguards, blah blah blah) it might have served her better.
But in our reality I'm pleased society has stepped up for her.
Well said. Even as our culture purportedly idealizes the value of a person's inner being rather than appearances, one of the uncomfortable things this story drove home to me is -- I can't say it better than you have: "how intimately our humanity is linked to a face".
The image used in the meta-tag for preview/social-media is especially striking to me: several surgeons crowd around the face to be transplanted as it lies, disconnected, as if it were just a Halloween mask: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/magazine/righ...
It brought to mind a memorable passage in David Simon's book, "Homicide", in which he describes the most disturbing stage of an autopsy:
> In the final phase of the internal exam, the pathologist uses the electric saw to cut the circumference of the skull, the top of which is then popped upward with a lever-like tool. Pulling from behind the ears, the skin of the victim’s scalp is then folded forward across the face so that any head wound can be tracked and the brain itself can be removed, weighed and examined for disease. For observers, the detectives included, this last stage of the autopsy is perhaps the hardest. The sound of the saw, the cranial pop from the lever, the image of the facial skin being covered by scalp—nothing makes the dead seem quite so anonymous as when the visage of every individual is folded in upon itself in a rubbery contortion, as if we’ve all been wandering this earth wearing dimestore Halloween masks, so easily and indifferently removed.
Thanks. I was thinking if this is one reason why facial recognition is so anathema to most people (as is to me). Not just because it's a violation of our privacy but it uses the very feature (our face) which as I said in so deeply part of being a human as a weapon against us.
Can't even imagine how guilty boyfriend feels in this situation..
But I also try to do a few things:
1. Try to help my kids keep things in perspective. Don't hide the risk of pain and failure from them. Instead, warn them that such things will happen, and try to teach resilience.
2. Watch out for signs of depression in my kids. If I ever see them, I'll treat it seriously and get them help as soon as possible.
3. That said, I also try to keep things in perspective myself. There are so many big risks. The best I can do is care for my little ones as best I can.
My greatest fear is that I will emotionally injure my kids despite my unconditional love for them. I make mistakes afterall, sometimes not even realizing it.
You will. We all scar our children in different ways. The best we can do is make those scars as shallow as possible.
There are so many ways to commit suicide it's hardly worth listing them here. If her family kept any pills in the bathroom it's likely she could have killed herself without leaving the room.
In 1998, the UK restricted sales of paracetamol (acetaminophen) to packs of no more than 32 tablets. The result was a lasting reduction in suicides by paracetamol poisoning, with no commensurate increase in suicide attempts by other means. Several studies have found that interventions like installing suicide prevention barriers on bridges can reduce the suicide rate rather than merely changing the choice of means.
https://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f403
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/useful-links/bibli...
If you take an overdose of tablets or slit your wrists, you'll probably survive with suitable medical care. You probably have the opportunity to change your mind, call an ambulance and save your own life. Very few people survive a gunshot wound to the head; all of them sustain life-altering injuries.
You have the right to own a gun, but that comes with responsibilities. You need to recognise that your gun poses a serious risk to you and your family, especially if it isn't consistently stored in a suitable gun safe or someone in the house is at risk of suicide.
If you're worried about the mental health of a family member, controlling their access to convenient and highly lethal means of suicide could well prevent an impulsive decision from becoming a tragedy. Clear out your liquor cabinet, throw out any surplus medication and get your gun out of the house.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9068255/suicide-impulsive-gun-...
* Ropes or any kind of cords that can be used for hanging * Blades of any kind (kitchen knives, scissors, box cutters, utility knives, etc.) * Anything that can be sharpened into a point that can puncture flesh * Any kind of chemical substance that can be deadly in sufficient quantities. * Any bodies of water where one can drown * Any accessible point that is high enough for one to jump off of.
The list goes on. Eventually, the environment that is left would basically be a padded room in a psychiatric hospital in a straightjacket.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9068255/suicide-impulsive-gun-...
0: https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3#15 1: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-... 2: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/nvsr66_06.pdf
From that link:
> Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010).
Firearms being used in self defense =/= lives saved by firearms.
Edit: posted in a different comment but including here as well.
> A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.
I personally don't own a gun (I'm also in Canada where things are a bit different) but I have to admit that if someone broke into my house I would prefer to have one than not. That doesn't mean that unrestricted gun ownership is a net good though, of course.
Fortunately it appears we can all agree that it is critical gun owners store and secure their guns properly. In my opinion that would be a good place for new laws to focus: for example you could be required to demonstrate that you have a secure storage location and proper training before you could be licensed to own a firearm.
Someone actually has broken into my home, when I was there, and I am profoundly grateful that I, and probably the burglar, didn't have a gun available.
It didn't even cross my mind to arm myself with a weapon. I offered him a cup of tea. I told him I had nothing of value in the flat, and that it'd be safer for him to come down from the loft and leave by the front door than to climb down the scaffolding of the building next door (which is how he got in). He declined the tea, and decided to leave via the scaffolding. I called the police, and they found him in the garden of the house next door. He pulled a beer bottle on them, they subdued and arrested him.
Guns and weapons would have made this mildly stressful situation hugely worse.
I feel the need to again emphasize that in general I am in support of gun control and that I don't personally own guns; I can see how a person might want to though.
You appear to be assuming that using a firearm in self-defense means killing in self-defense. If that is your position (I apologize if I'm misinterpreting you), I am not convinced you are correct. Many uses of firearms in self-defense are brandishing only; and even if a firearm is discharged in self-defense, it is not a given that it kills the original aggressor.
Chances are there were pills in the medicine cabinet that could have been used as well. Or countless other ways that also take only a split second decision (and that's assuming she picked up the gun off the table and didn't have to go find it).
Come on, you're smarter than this.
While there are countless other ways to commit suicide, experience shows taking away just one of the tools can save many, many lives.
I have found two studies with that claim. One is going state by state (like there may be no other factors?) [1]. The second is comparing urban Maryland vs rural (if you've ever been to rural Maryland, you'd know comparing it to Baltimore is ridiculous) [2].
[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/ [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/suicide-rates-mary...
0: https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3#15 1: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-... 2: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/nvsr66_06.pdf
The source actually says:
> Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008. > On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey.
It is a huge leap to say that approximately every defensive use of a firearm prevented a death. It does not come anywhere close to passing the sniff test, as we don't see unarmed people dying of crime in the massive numbers implied by your misquote.
> A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.
I agree that it's not a definitive link, which is part of why I said we need more data, but the it's not non-existent either. I wish police departments would track and report this statistic like they do murders and suicides.
Have similar statistics been acquired in other western countries, but with much more strict gun ownership laws, i.e. people can't protect themselves from violence?
It sound to me that it's a vicious circle, isn't it? Guns are easy to get -> bad people get guns -> good people need to get guns to protect themselves -> everybody is "fealing threatened for their lives".
Note that there's a fine line between pathologizing normal personality variations, and missing real issues.
For this particular instance, I think your claim is essentially the inverse of #whataboutism.
Watch how they handle disappointment in smaller things, helping them to cope. Maybe this article will open their eyes to how decisions made in a moment of passion can affect their lives and the lives of many others.
You will not be able to protect them from everything. Start with that understanding and prepare.
I know that it is off-topic, and the topic of the article is much more serious than web technology, but I feel it is always worth pointing out that if a high-profile website like www.nationalgeographic.com can't provide elementary functionality without javascript, what hope is there for the smaller websites?
In this case, though, I am glad the images are not shown, the text description was gruesome enough.
The JS in the NatGeo story is used for certain important and dramatic effects, such as the transition from a full page photo of the patient's original face, to the x-ray after her suicide attempt, to what her face looked like after the 22 reconstruction surgeries. The JS allows for as graceful a transition as possible while forcing the user to see the entirety of each of the faces. Scrolling through the photos with a standard vertical scroll would not have the same effect. Nor would a static layout of the 3 photos side by side (since they'd have to be drastically scaled down in size).
As you said, the subject matter is gruesome. The photos are best seen each all at once, as they would on a magazine print page. The JS for the feature works as a pretty good digital replacement for a physical page turn, IMO.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html
Several years ago I tried to kill myself by cutting my neck. I sliced below the jaw-line from my ear to my chin. I still have "numb areas" after 3+ years, and there aren't really any muscles there that need to be controlled. It's very easy to imagine not ever getting full facial muscle control back in her situation.
> Adrea Schneider’s organs and tissues have helped at least seven people.
> From halting infections to curing blindness, a single donor can save or
> improve more than 70 lives. Enroll to donate organs, eyes, and tissues
> at RegisterMe.org and marrow at BeTheMatch.org. To donate a kidney
> or part of a liver or other organ while alive, contact a transplant center.
All it takes is a simple checkbox to say you want to be a part of it.
It should be easier to receive mailing list spam, than it is to sign over your body, but opt-out makes it the other way around.
Forgetting (or being unwilling to be forced) to sign a checkbox does not make one a willing participant, but an unwitting one. I understand this saves lives, but then again, lots of unconstitional actions may save lives. No excuse. No convience.
You, and only you, as an adult, has sovereignity over your body. Opt-out is a grave breach of this sovereignity. That is the spin "the government wants control over my body": A violation of your human rights and a government-run organ market.
For instance, send a letter every 6 months where you tell of the social benefits of donating your organs and thank-you notes from receivers. Sponsor national organ donation days. Even properly aligned incentives: Make certain government-sponsored health care cheaper and more available for donors than non-donors.
But make any opt-in cryptographically verifiable, and signed with an e-ID. I really don't want my opt-out hacked during DEFCON 2023. And implement it correctly: often government attempts to curb self-ownership are well-intented (physical and mental healthcare), but ill-executed (block internet porn, close fast food restaurants, ban psychedelic drugs) and they compound.
I full well realize that anything that happens after my death is out of my hands. Even if I don't donate now and opt-out, maybe in a 1000 years they can clone some of my DNA to grow new organs. It is purely about opt-in vs. opt-out for me (and about democratically consulting the majority opinion on an opt-out).
Opt-out (happens during life and on life-support) of self-ownership [1] is, to me, a violation of human rights. One of the most fundamental and innate rights, which should be a given (but could be opted out of by opting-in for donorship). To partly take away a right, unless you say "no!" sets a dangerous precedent.
> Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law. No-one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law. - Human Rights Act 1998
> The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. [not: are beneficial to others, unless you want to posit that opting out of donorship injures others in need] - Jefferson
So it boils down to what do you consider death?
> My impression is this is only true for some transplant types.
Other way around. Organ donation after cardiac death is only possible for certain types, and only in very limited circumstances.
Hopefully things will improve because it would vastly increase the number of possible donations. The vast majority of people can not donate organs even if they want to - it requires a very specific type of death (brain death where the body is just fine).
Many people also have religious and ethical problems with it because you are killing someone. Obviously that depends on how they define death, which has no commonly accepted definition, the current definition "brain death" was set that way to make organ donation possible, and that makes many people uneasy.
Hence changing it to opt out - don't want to donate organs? Fine - opt out.
Let's take this as a fact. You don't solve the problem by flipping this around, because then you only solve for social gain. You just make it worse for the individual:
> It's opt-out now, and easy to opt out, yet despite many people saying they don't support it, few opt out.
Now you have people not supporting (or wanting to remain blissfully unaware of) donorship, registered as donors. You bank on apathy and ignorance, because a simple and deliberate opt-in was not convincing enough, and turned supporters for or against, but still, for whatever reason, on the fence, into fair gain.
Having your cake and eating it: If it is very easy to go through opt-in process, yet there are problems with registering a deliberate choice, then it will also be very easy to go through opt-out process, but there will be the same problems with registering a deliberate choice. The ease cancels out, and the problems remain. But taking away a human right, until registered protest, is far worse than a deliberate opting out of it.
For me, an opt-in model where it is hard to avoid not making an active choice sounds like the best solution.
Like if you have to renew drivers-license, ID-card, passport etc, you have to fill out an organ donor form. This encourages people to make a choice, which I have no problem with.
The main problem today (at least in Denmark, which is the system I know best), is that people want to be organ donors, but just never get around to opting in. 90% answer that they are in favour of organ donation, but only 22% have actually registered their choice in the central organ donation registry.
I think had this been my own situation I'd rather have some kind of plastic prosthetic than someone else's face and a lifetime of rejection treatment. I just don't think my psychology could handle the physical and emotional pain of accepting another face. That said, I know little about living with the alternative that she was dealing with.
Crazy story.
The options are to keep the mangled face, or replace.
I hope Katie and her family are continually keeping in mind how they are helping push medical science forward and benefiting future patients. That's a big part of the value of these efforts, in my mind.
If the choice is between being a monster guaranteed to be mistreated and abhorred by most people vs potentially being a somewhat decently normal-looking person, then I think there is no way that someone would choose the way of the monster.
Who puts a loaded hunting rifle in so accessible way in their homes?
I hope the procedure can manage to give her some small semblance of peace.
As someone who sincerely has every intention of "being strong", my current behavior is indistinguishable from the times I was pretending to be strong due to the huge cost of behaving otherwise.
She - like a mentally-vegetative senior citizen on life-support - reminds us how little the word "alive" really means, by itself.
If you own dangerous tools that don't happen to be useful outside hunting (bolt-action, small magazine, high-penetration cartridges), you also want to store the dangerous tool in a secure manner. That clearly was not the case in this story.
But the issue exists no matter who does the shooting - there are groups who protest any kind of animal shooting, even if their population is wildly out of control.
The second level of the story is exposing the all-too-common issues of American society: Katie's rushed suicide attempt using her brother's unsecured rifle and the donor being an amphetamine overdose. It's horrifying but at least it fits together this time.
Imagine a "face" that would exist for many generations, given from one to another multiple times...
Not sure what to think of that.
They mentioned that the donor had to be from someone of a similar age; these things deteriorate over time, like the rest of our bodies. Even for internal organs, younger is better.
What exactly is meant with "if the donor's condition started to decline"? How does one monitor the condition of organs in a dead body? What technology is used to monitor the state of organs in a dead body?
I am very fascinated about the possible technology involved for monitorinng the state of these organs while the face was being removed. Or am I overimagining and its mostly heart rate, and blood content (oxygen, glucose, what others?) ?
Us normal citizens -seldom in contact with death- we must have an oversimplified view of alive vs dead: atomic (before and after) and monolithic (the whole person is dead, or the whole person is alive), while we are in fact multicellular organisms and some cells have more demanding needs to be met depending on cell type, location in the body, and so on. I can imagine a failing human body prioritizes the functionality of some organs over others?
In the text they mention that donor side and acceptor side can initiate communication through the centralized authority, without obligation to respond, and if they both consent they are allowed to meet each othe as happened here.
Here they had to request explicit permission for the face.
What happens if there was not enough time for properly removing the face yet the donor's next of kin try to ccontact the (non-existent) acceptor? Do they get by policy a "no counterparty response" boilerplate, or are they informed that in fact there was no recipient due to complications?
At the hospital, protocols for determining brain death vary depending on the institution, but we have more advanced tools than just EEG now. I see a lot of radiological investigations that measure cerebral metabolism with scintigraphy - here's an example of what that looks like with a poor outcome (I am not a radiologist by any means, and I explored this outside of being an EMT) [1]. Notice how the brainstem is dark but the rest of the brain isn't doing much. Other investigations such as some MRI sequences may prove useful to identify ischemic insults and damage that strongly correlate with poor outcomes. Based on the phrasing of your question, I would point out that these tests would only be performed on a patient where brain death were clinically suspected based on e.g. prolonged cerebral hypoxia from a drug overdose... not every dying patient.
I don't know enough about the medicolegal or surgical side of things to go into more detail there.
[1] - https://img.medscapestatic.com/pi/meds/ckb/59/26659tn.jpg
They mentioned cocaine, I never realized you could die by cocaine? What is LD50 of cocaine in street units, say "lines"?
Why are some people in coma declared dead and others kept alive? Have people ever "recovered" from coma? Is it a question of permission from next of kin to keep the patient alive? Or does it boil down to a financial question?
I could try my best but I am pretty sure I would simply fail to sniff 75 average lines. It seems impossible to succeed.
In cases where a patient isn't dead, they or their health care proxy have the right to turn down treatments, including those necessary for life. Not everyone wants to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state, even if they are not dead, and for plenty of reasons other than the cost.
Her choice of aim was likely just the first thing to come to mind, given her short stature compared to the length of a Remington rifle.
Had she thought on this one iota more, tilted her neck down and placed the muzzle onto her forehead ... the result would have been very different.
I should also point out that since a bolt-action .308 is just about one of the worst possible civilian weapons to use for home-defense, and that therefore it was likely a hunting tool ... there was no excuse for this gun and its ammunition to be kept in an insecure manner.
That said, the make is irrelevant. What is relevant is that getting all the muzzle energy and accuracy out of a .308 cartridge so as to make it useful for hunting, means a rather long barrel, and specifically one about as long as the M700's barrel.
Also, I'll admit that the rate-of-fire is not actually relevant because you still don't want to use any kind of .308 cartridge for home defense, because of overpenetration.
However, Remington's M700 is the most popular civilian-available weapon in the US, by far, which meets the description of ".308 hunting rifle".
2. Someone other than the owner, obtained it without authorization. That means that it was not securely stored.
NYT does these kind of scrolling picture stories but at least in those its long-form content interspersed with images and it scrolls at a "normal" pace for most of the article.
Come on, do we really need this comment on every post? Especially this one?
Honest question, why? I just find it slightly inappropriate and not adding much value
A fascinating part of this is considering whether I as an organ donor would want my face continuing to exist on someone else after my own death.
ps: if you're reading this and are not signed up as an organ donor, please consider taking a minute to do so right now: https://www.dmv.org/organ-donor.php
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/suicide-survivor-becomes-younge...