Longreads

A man with blood phobia discovers an effective treatment for his condition:

"He tells me to close my eyes as he puts a new image on the screen of the computer. It is a red dot. I tense my muscles. No problem. And so it goes, until I am looking at blood dripping off the cuticle of a nail. Still, no problem. 'I love treating phobics,' Taylor says, grinning. 'It’s so wonderful to see people do these exercises and get better quickly. It's so effective.'"

The medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.