No, if a patient is declared brain dead, there is usually no sedation given. It shouldn’t be necessary, as the neurons responsible for sensing pain aren’t alive and processing signals, and extra medication like sedation comes with the risk of hemodynamic instability, which is already kind of a headache in brain dead patients as the brain is no longer meditating that (extremely oversimplified). Yes, sedation can be measured (sorta) with a BIS probe, a spectral imaging probe on the forehead that acts like an EEG with fewer probes, but it’s not very useful in brain death as it’s ultimately looking at blood flow, and in brain death, we don’t expect to see blood flow to the brain.

All of this, of course, assumes that he was declared brain dead, which is a very specific legal term with very specific parameters that vary slightly state by state, which seems unlikely in this situation. He may have been deemed to have a severe neurologic injury with an unlikely prognosis of meaningful recovery, and thus be a planned DCD (declared cardiac death) donation, meaning placed on a minimally assistive ventilatory support and allowed to die once his respiratory drive was so low he died of hypoxic respiratory failure. But the article is long on anecdotes and short on the technical terms physicians would use, so it’s hard to say.

As a surgeon, I have a lot of questions. But I have trouble accepting a personal injury attorney’s statement at face value when they stand to benefit from a judgement or settlement, too.

Huh, and here I was thinking you didn’t have to test Fallout games to release them.

“I only killed that one girl, not my accomplice”??

I mean, the whole turning point of the story was the death on the boat. But I guess that was cool?

I wish I could set aside a week to write down all Donald Trump says in court.

… wait no I don’t.

For college football fans, Shutdown Fullcast, the only college football podcast. They occasionally accidentally talk about football.

The US approach to donation is odd, to say the least. You can’t be paid for blood, or organs. Blood products, like plasma, aren’t actually regulated and you can be compensated for them. The companies that collect those blood and organs you can’t profit from? They can make money from those transactions.

The one thing they’re good at unless someone is trying to make a terrorist attack against Russia.

He was a part of a group holding a large American flag at midfield, I think for a Giants game. He’s holding it at his waist and it’s flapping in the wind.

He might want to check to see how the troops and their leaders feel about that.