Paolo was abandoned for hours in a corridor of the Accident and Emergency ward of the ‘Ospedale Maggiore’ hospital in Trieste’. It was Paolo’s father, whilst caressing his son, who discovered the swelling and wound on his son’s nape, which is a symptom of cranial trauma and which requires immediate treatment. Valuable time was wasted because, since it was Saturday night, they believed Paolo to be drunk. At that point Paolo was intubated and transferred to the ‘Cattinara’ hospital in Trieste, the excuse being that they needed to carry out a CAT scan, which was not possible at the ‘Ospedale Maggiore’. But the real reason for taking him to the ‘Cattinara’ hospital was to place him in the Intensive Care Unit and proceed with the explants.
No effort was made to save my son’s life in the first 24 hours. He received no treatment before the decision to explant his organs was made. They didn’t even X-ray his head which would have shown the fractures.
The time of the first CAT scan, which is necessary for diagnosis and treatment, is not known.
The time of the consultancy with the neurosurgeon was not noted and there was no second consultancy even thought the consultant himself requested it.
Worst of all is that Paolo was declared to be ‘brain dead’ when he was curarized, that is pharmacologically paralyzed and sedated by several drugs which take hours to be eliminated from the body. How could his spontaneous breathing be evaluated if Paolo was asleep and paralysed?
Paolo and Eluana are two young people whose fate was determined by the interests of medicine, indifferent to their suffering and the suffering of their parents.
Let’s return to “science and conscience” away from the authoritarian protocols of Public Health Service which has forced us to be divided into guinea-pigs: those like Eluana to carry out experiments on her brain and those like Paolo for his organs. Until the day I die I will continue to remind you that my son was killed by 7 hours of explants and that the signature for these explants was extorted from us when we were stunned with grief, which is something that will torment us forever.