Transplants and comas

Hi!
My MC is in need of an organ transplant in order to survive. I was thinking kidney or liver, but I'm flexible.

1. How could a defect with either kidney or liver be found in a seemingly healthy 17-year-old?
2. How long could she manage to stay alive without a transplant?
3. Would she have to be put in the hospital from day one and stay there until she gets her transplant, or could she go home from time to time?
4. She will, after surgery, end up in a coma, and I want her to still be able to think, hear and feel, but not be able to move, see or speak. Is that realistic?

Thank you for you time,
Luna

I can only answer #4, and that's because the answer is: We don't know. As many other threads on comas have said, there's not nearly enough known about comas to provide a definitive answer on that count. However, I'm fairly certain a coma is characterized by severely decreased brain activity, so she probably wouldn't be able to think. You might try cataplexy instead, though I'm not sure how long it's possible for that to last.

Thanks, I'll look it up :)

Well, I think if you're having kidney problems / kidney failure, for a while you could get by going to dialysis - that'd be about 3 or 4 times a week, where you're hooked up to a machine for about 3 hours while it cleans your blood. There's a lot of literature on how kidney dialysis and transplants work, so I bet you could look that stuff up. As far as I understand, the problem that occurs, is that the rest of the body can't handle that stress and slowly other organs start to shut down.

As far as a 17 year old having kidney problems, I do know an older, very healthy man who had gotten diabetes while in the marines, and the diabetes ended up leading to kidney failure. I'm not sure if that's plausible for your story or for a seventeen year old, but you could always look that stuff up. (:

Thanks I'll look into it! :)

There are genetic-based illnesses that could take out an organ, as well as infections or even an accident that damages the organ. Heck, you could get stabbed or impaled and lose a kidney. Particularly dangerous if you were only born with one (it happens, and you might never know until they have reason to check).

Thank you! :)

From personal experience: even if you can hear and feel stuff in your coma, your state of consciousness is such that it doesn't process properly.

No, when I was in the coma I apparently responded to outside stimuli but, and this is the key criteria, "I" experienced nothing.

My _body_ responded to stimuli. It cried in frustration and turned towards familiar voices.

_I_ did not respond to stimuli. The entity I identify as myself did not participate in these actions, and has no recollection of these actions. The closest analogy I have to it is my occasional sleepwalking and talking. The most dramatic incident was when I was in the army and they decided to haze me and I burst off the bed and put the biggest guy in a flying armbar and THEN I woke up.

I was not involved in any of that; my body saw stimuli and responded accordingly. My consciousness was not involved at all.

It is possible that _some_ of the things said in my presence were "heard" by me, but definitely not _all_ of the things, because I didn't always respond.

You know, kind of the way we sometimes obviously hear things in our sleep and respond but never have any recollection of it when we wake up? Like that.

No, I am saying that all the evidence points to an inconsistent ability for people in a coma to "hear" things. I am saying that you cannot expect that a person in a coma hears everything you say the same way that he would if he were awake, because, guess what? A coma is an altered state of consciousness, and thus by definition it's not the same.

We prosecute a drunkard on the actions of his drunkenness, but not on the basis that he is the same person when drunk as when he is sober. We prosecute him because he is aware that he is a different person and still chooses to get drunk.

And extending your analogy: a drunken person in a rage very often won't hear you. He won't recall the incident either, but _during_ the incident he actually won't hear you. The words will enter his ears, but they won't process in his brain.

The fact that a person on the outside responds to stimuli does not mean that there is a functioning consciousness on the inside. Case studies show that patients in a coma _may_ respond to stimuli, and that sometimes people in a coma claim to have heard things from the outside, usually towards the end of a coma, which should make you suspect that right there. And that is all. Unless you have a record of someone waking from a coma and being able to read back all the things that were said by his or her bedside?

I am saying that response to stimuli does not have to involve the consciousness inside.

Let's talk about that.

There is a condition called "blindsight". The person actually responds to visual stimuli, and yet is entirely unconscious of that fact. In short, the consciousness in the body is not in sync with what the body is doing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight

Another one:

People who have had their corpus callosum removed, thus separating the hemispheres of their brain, can be shown an instruction to one eye, obey that sentence, and when questioned why they did that, come up with a reason that is entirely fictional. In other words, they have responded to complex incoming stimuli, and yet are entirely unaware that they have done so.

You begin to see the complexity of this? Just because part of the brain responds, it does not mean that "the person" has responded.

You are suggesting that a person in a coma can "hear". Maybe your English isn't very good, as you say, but the implication of that suggestion is that the person in a coma can "hear just as well as if he were awake", which is absurd.

My point is that a coma is very similar to sleep. Can we "hear" things in our sleep? Certainly. Do those sounds map in our head to what they do in real life? Not neccesarily.

Do you understand the concept of altered state of consciousness? Do you understand that when you are in an altered state of consciousness, your consciousness does not register stimuli as it would when it is not altered? If not, which part of "altered" and "consciousness" did you not understand?