I saw a movie called John Q with Denzel Washington where he planned to do that for his son who needed a heart, but he did not have to in the end. He knew he was an appropriate tissue type match for his son, so he planned to kill himself so the heart transplant surgeon could use his heart for his son.
Here is a blurb for it:
There is probably no stronger love than that felt between a parent and a small child. In John Q, this is explored through a father's desperate attempt to get a heart transplant for his dying son. When he and his wife discover that their insurance will not cover such a costly procedure he grows more and more frustrated until finally he does the only thing he has left to do. He takes over the emergency room, holding several patients, interns and a doctor hostage, demanding that his son is placed on the heart donor list.
That is what my daughter's medical bills were, $250,000. Thank goodness we had health insurance that covered her, even though it was a HMO which kept sending her home from the hospital to die.
Does she still have those problems?
Hope that you don't mind that I answer here instead of on the suicide thread, Eclair. I can get kind of long-winded sometimes.
My daughter was born with a large Ventricular Septal Defect. That is a hole in the heart that is located between the main pumping stations, the ventricles. It caused excessive blood to flood her lungs, while not enough was being pumped to her body. Her heart could not keep up with all this extra work, so she went into congestive heart failure when she was just a few days old. We tried Digitalis and first Aldactazide and then Lasix. She was losing weight while her liver swelled and she was struggling to breathe enough to keep all the blood in her lungs oxygenated. We tried switching from feeding her breast milk to feeding her expressed milk from a bottle, then we tried adding more calories to it, then we used a feeding pump at night. Nothing helped. She had open heart surgery when she was just three weeks old to fix this VSD, as well as a couple of other heart defects she was born with, a PDA and a PFO. Then she nearly died and had to go on ECMO for almost a week. ECMO stands for Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation. It is a sort of heart-lung machine.
Her heart issues are pretty much fixed now, except she has a heart block, which is a conduction abnormality that shows up on a Electrocardiogram. Also her lungs were affected by the excess blood flow for those three weeks, so she has a slight murmur. She still has other medical issues that will need to be addressed in the future.
