Talk:Broken Heart/@comment-1674153-20190513235549

I have so many questions.

This Packard guy, is he fictional? Why didn't Miller destroy the heart? Why does the effect pivot on two weeks?

And on a purely factual level, and because learning is fun, my research suggests that EMT's on site are not USUALLY permitted to remove organs from bodies, even if they are organ donors. Donors must be confirmed brain dead by more than one doctor, and are harvested upon the inspection of an agent of an organ procurement organization. These guys are on call to travel instantly whenever a possible donor comes up, because it is usually a matter of life and death for people who need the donations, but between them being notified and arriving and possibly determining that yes, the organs can be harvested, and fully informing the next of kin about the process...well, all that can take up to half a day or so, during which time the body is currently preserved at a hospital so the necrotic process doesn't degrade the quality of the organs before surgery can even be legally permitted, let alone happen.

And even if all of that wasn't true, the whole process of organ donation USUALLY has to be set up before one dies - i.e. the donor in question has to be at least alive enough to have made it to the ICU of a hospital (or ambulance) and hooked up to life support machinery. Death without this machinery in place will make the organs immediately unusable, because there is no oxygen being provided and the cells will die.

THAT SAID - I have a heart surgeon friend who I called specifically for this question, and he told me that in spite of all the legal tape that I mentioned, EMTs can remove organs from bodies at the site of death. The implication there, however, was that the EMTs find the body almost immediately after the cause of death and the victim's drivers license is on hand to notate that that they are an organ donor to begin with  - and together that makes this much more common during an automobile accident. Bodies that have been dead for any indeterminate amount of time are in no way considered organ donors.