Donate Life

I don't have time to rehash this whole crazy week, but here's a modified excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend about my time on Transplant Surgery.

We had no actual transplants scheduled for the week, so it was shaping up to be a kind of slow week, with a couple of minor surgeries to address complications of past transplants. Then on Thursday morning, with a huge snowstorm brewing, we got a call that there was a donor over at a hospital across town. Around 11:30, the Donor Alliance picked us up in their black Expedition, with a driver who looked straight out of Secret Service (sunglasses, suit, rarely spoke, said "Sir" and opened the doors for us), and lunch waiting for us in the car (since we wouldn’t otherwise have time to eat). We drove over to the hospital and the donor was all ready when we got there: prepped, draped, only his torso showing underneath all the blue sterile drapes, with a huge tattoo covering his whole chest and stomach. It’s a bizarre surgery, because his heart is beating and he is breathing on a ventilator, even though he’s “dead” and the anesthesiologist is managing him fairly aggressively in order to get high enough blood pressures not to damage the organs. They cut him open from sternum to pelvis, crack the ribs, and get everything ready to take the organs out. On the surgeon’s signal, the aorta gets clamped, the main vein back to the heart gets cut, the ice gets poured into the abdominal cavity, and they start cutting the arteries to the liver and kidneys. Then the anesthesiologist leaves, because the patient is no longer alive. It was a very humbling and surreal surgery to watch the heart actually stop beating and to go from essentially an alive patient to an almost empty body cavity. But there's a certain amount of necessary detachment to do it. We took the liver and both kidneys back to the University Hospital for transplant (the roads were horrible because of the snow, and we were an hour and a half late getting back) and they took the heart and one lung for research. Once we got back, everything was in full swing. Our liver recipient was already in the hospital, because of hip pain, so they took her back to the operating room, and the surgery was about 7 hours overall. She bled a lot and we had to give her about 7 liters of blood and almost 7 liters of plasma back during the surgery, but the liver started working right away, and she was doing great. I got about 4 hours of sleep that night and then was back the next morning to transplant the two kidneys. Both patients also did really well. It’s a less traumatic surgery because they leave both native kidneys in the body and just put the transplant down by the bladder and connect it up to the blood vessels. It was incredible to see these organs come out of the ice bath, and as soon as you connect blood flow to them, they start working again, in a brand new body. Three lives were totally changed by this one donor. So, exhausted, but a very cool week.

Tell your loved ones you want to be a donor.