Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain

by Allan H. Ropper

We could show that he had apnea (that he couldn’t breathe on his own), but that’s just one of the five elements of the tests for death by brain criteria. The Presidential Commission said that in certain circumstances you can use surrogate tests. So we did an EEG. He had barely enough scalp on which to place the leads, and the readout was flat, or, in tech-speak, isoelectric. We did a cerebral blood flow scan. The examination took hours, not because his face was blown off, but because I had a tough time persuading the nuclear medicine people to come in and do the test at night for a dead guy. They said, “We’ll come in and do it in the morning.” I said, “They don’t want to lose his organs. Come in now.” They said, “Oh, c’mon!” “No, get your ass in here and do it or I’ll keep kicking it up the chain until somebody does.” Finally their man came in, injected technetium, a radioactive element which circulates to show if there’s any blood going into the brain. There wasn’t. No one agonized over the case, possibly because the biker no longer had eyes, unlike Marty’s example of the dog hit by the car. There wasn’t much left of him as a recognizable person. But inside, he possessed pristine organs that did an inconceivable amount of good, perhaps even a redemptive amount of good. Could we say the same for Mike Kavanagh?