In Beijing, China, a 13-year old girl attempted suicide, in order to donate her liver to her father, who apparently had cancer. To help shuffle her off this mortal coil, she chose the decidedly nonviolent method or downing 200 sleeping pills (women tend to kill themselves in a manner that preserves their faces). However, there are two levels of irony here that make this incident much more tragic than other accidents involving adolescents. First, even though you can't live without your liver, if you want to help someone who needs one (and you happen to match on all levels of the HLA), you can donate part of your liver. Some organs grow back, and some don't - the liver is one of them that does (Keep in mind, though, that severe damage - alcoholic cirrhosis, some types of hepatitis - can damage a liver beyond repair; only a healthy, not-too-badly-damaged liver can regenerate itself).
That would be enough irony for one day, but it gets worse - the fact that she tried to kill herself with sleeping pills probably caused irreversible hepatic damage. The enzymes and chemicals in the body that break down all of the harmful, poisonous products we take in (alcohol, medications, etc), are broken down by cells of the liver. With a high enough load of toxic chemicals, those detoxifying cells (more specifically, the hepatocyte smooth endoplasmic reticulum) simply die. The girl is in intensive care right now, I suppose. Surprisingly, the Chinese Daily News refers only to the burns she received from an electrical blanket while unconscious, and mentions nothing of the fact that, now, both father and daughter may need a liver transplant.
Poor kid - she was just trying to help, I guess.
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