Seventeen years ago today, a man, probably a shorter-than-average man, died in Tampa, Florida. It is nor clear how the man died. What is clear is that his death was discovered almost immediately. Perhaps he was shot (in which case, police or paramedics would likely have discovered his death reasonably quickly); perhaps he was a casualty of a fatal automobile accident (police or paramedics again); perhaps he died in a hospital (unless you're unlucky enough to have sought medical attention in a place like the the emergency room of Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, a doctor or nurse in a hospital generally notices pretty quickly that you've died). He did not die alone in has home, his body to be found only after several days; nor did he jump off of a bridge, his bloated corpse to be discovered washed up on a nearby shore the following morning; nor was he abducted by Martians who were interested in how the human body... Whatever: someone discovered his death very shortly after its occurrence.
Within minutes of the discovery of his death, a surgeon was aboard a small jet flying towards Tampa; within hours, he was at the scene of the man's death (at the side of a highway, rubbernecking drivers sliding past; on a police-taped sidewalk; in a hospital: again, circumstances of death are unknown), surgically removing the dead man's liver with the scalpel he'd brought with him. He placed the liver in a cooler which he'd also brought with him. Minutes after that, he was airborne again, this time on his way to Boston.
1,500 miles away that day, my mom was in Bangor, Maine (forty five minutes from Blue Hill, where I grew up) for a doctor's appointment at Eastern Maine Medical Center. There is an excellent small-town hospital in Blue Hill, but there aren't too many specialists there, and my mom's condition required a specialist. She'd been ill for almost two years. There was a problem with her bile duct; it was blocked up. She'd been to a hospital in Wisconsin a few times to have it cleared out, but periodically clearing it out was not, it had become clear, a permanent solution to her problem. Her problem was that these recurring blockages were causing bile -- great for digesting food but potent, and toxic -- to back up into her liver, slowly destroying it.
So five months prior to this early-November appointment with her doctor at the hospital in Bangor, her doctors had decided that she needed a liver transplant. They'd given her a pager (this was before normal people had cell phones), and told her not to stray more than fifty miles from the pager's tower, which was twenty miles or so from Blue Hill. When a liver suitable to replace the one which was giving up on her after fifty-eight years became available, the idea was that the pager would beep, and after placing a confirming phone call, my mom would get on the first plane to Boston get a cab to New England Medical Center. (My parents, both born explorers, had gotten out a map and taken a drafting compass and drawn a hundred-mile circle around the pager tower, and had been spending the odd Saturday or Sunday exploring the back roads of down-east Maine, never straying outside of the circle they'd drawn on their map.)
There'd been several false alarms, though: the pager would go off, and my mom would made the confirming phone call, only to be told that there'd been a mix-up of some kind, a false alarm. So, she'd waited: she'd continued to teach kindergarten, and, with my dad, to hop in the car occasionally and explore the back roads within their pager-tower circle. But the whites of her eyes and her skin had become discolored by jaundice; she wasn't well. The day before her visit to the doctor in Bangor, she'd told the principal at Blue Hill Consolidated School, my alma mater, that she didn't think she could finish the semester.
When the organ-transplant team at New England Medical Center, one the edge of the theater district in Boston, got word that an airborne liver was en route from Tampa aboard its own private jet with its own surgeon escort, they determined that the in-flight liver was suitable for my mom (it was small enough, for one thing: the majority of usable -- because they've been "harvested" soon enough after death -- livers come from male donors, and male donors' livers are often too large for female recipients, which is why it's likely that the Tampa donor was on the short side), and paged my mom, but the signal didn't make it through. The transplant team at the hospital in Boston called her doctor in Bangor, and as luck would have it, there my mom was, in his office with him. My parents drove the few miles to the Bangor airport and took the next flight to Boston. They were prepping her in the operating room before the Tampa liver arrived at the hospital.
Liver transplants are trickier than other organ transplants (which are, of course, tricky enough): while there are machines that can, at least temporarily, do what other organs do, no such machine exists (or it didn't then) that can replicate what a patient's liver does to keep him or her from being alive as opposed to being dead. So, a liver transplant that goes awry is very, very bad news.
But by the time I'd flown from New York to Boston the next day, the surgeons had successfully removed my mom's defective liver and replaced it with the jet-setting Tampa one. She was in intensive care by then, and I went with my dad (and, I believe, my sister, who was in college in Nova Scotia at the time) to see her. She was in the midst of the long process of emerging from some very, very hard-core general anesthesia, the kind that shuts your organs down as much as they can be shut down without you dying. Her eyes were intermittently open (and the whites of her eyes quite swollen; why, I'm not sure), and they, her eyes, were looking around the room, looking confused and perhaps scared or even sad. She certainly wasn't talking, or probably aware of us in any meaningful way. She was neither conscious nor unconscious; she was drugged. Drugged, but alive, and with a good prognosis.
I didn't like seeing my mom that way. As we left the intensive-care ward, I felt -- a bit inexplicably given the good news of the successful transplant -- like punching a wall. I can't remember if I did that or not. I do remember eying a potential target-wall and noting that it wasn't made of cinder-block or brick or poured concrete or anything potentially bone-shattering, but of sheet-rock. It would have been the juvenile thing to do, punching that wall, so I may well have done it; I just don't remember.
She did regain, or start to regain, consciousness the next day. My dad was with her in the ICU. Still very groggy from the anesthetics, she asked him if they'd done the transplant. He told her that they'd done it, and that it had been a success. Hazily, referring to her old liver and to one of our house cats, she asked him, "so are they going to feed it to Garp, or what?" My dad wasn't sure if she was joking or (very confused but) serious; either way, she was okay.
That was seventeen years ago. Mom ended up back in the hospital a few weeks after being released; she'd developed an ulcer, a side effect of the many anti-rejection and other medications she'd begun to take after her transplant. The doctors treated the ulcer, and aside from the ulcer, she'd had what her doctors called a "textbook transplant." Her odds were good going in -- she was not an alcoholic, and didn't have diabetes (two common conditions which can lead to liver transplant, both of which can complicate recovery), and she recuperated for several months and returned to teaching the next year, and she's been fine ever since.
And every year on November 9th, she and my dad (and sometimes a few friends) celebrate. I spoke to her just now; she said, "Daddy is cooking me a liverwurst omelette!!!" (These annual celebrations often/always involve liver: liverwurst, pâté, or sometimes just... liver, and if you think that's a little odd, I suppose I do too, but my parents are a little odd, which is why I'm a little odd, thanks, and I wouldn't have it any other way.)
And we have to thank, for my mom's seventeen-year-old new liver -- aside from the miracles of modern medicine and air travel, as well as the dumb luck of birth into a first-world country -- an anonymous man from Tampa who'd filled out an organ donor card, so: thank you, anonymous man from Tampa.
And thank you, Mom and Dad, for being alive and for being the sort of people who celebrate that with liverwurst omelettes for dinner on a Sunday night!
