Completion

He looked like any other ICU patient. He was young, sure, but other than that he was pretty typical. The endotracheal tube down his throat was attached to the ventilator, which controlled his every respiration. The Foley catheter drained his urine into a bag at the side of the bed. While he lay still, the leads from the monitors indicated that his heart was beating rather fast, and that his blood carried a healthy amount of oxygen.

The only thing is that there was really very little at all that was healthy about this boy. Because this boy was dead. Brain dead. We were merely keeping his organs alive so that they could be harvested and donated to people currently fighting for their lives. This boy had already lost that fight.

His parents said their goodbyes, and kissed him one last time. We took him to the OR where we made an incision from the base of his neck to just above his pelvic bone, exposing his entire viscera. After some brief blood tests, the process commenced.

First a preserving fluid was infused throughout his body. Then he was exsanguinated. His heart was stopped and then quickly removed in a matter of minutes. The cardiac surgeon cradled it like a baby as he hurried to get it safely packaged for travel. At that point all the monitors were turned off and the anesthesia team left. The typical bleeping of the monitors went silent – it was as if our patient had somehow become more dead.

Attention was then turned to his abdomen. His liver was next to go. The student standing next to me remarked how big it looked – the surgeon had to scoop it with both hands as he turned and placed it on a table behind him. It was big, I thought to myself – until very recently it had been rather busy keeping a young, active boy alive.

His pancreas was dug out from behind his stomach, which had become eerily white now that all the blood had been let out. Finally the kidneys were plucked from the now relatively empty body cavity.

In “Never Let Me Go” Kazuo Ishiguro writes of individuals who are forced to donate their organs to society. It typically takes two or three trips to the OR before the individual finally succumbs, a process he calls completion. We completed this boy in just a couple hours.

It was an odd thing to stand there during this procurement process. In my mind were the horrible scenes from “Never Let Me Go” that turn organ donation into horrible thievery thinly cloaked as generous science. Yet what I was witnessing was truly an incredible gift that would help save the lives of numerous individuals. He was their prayers answered. And for his parents, it was a way to never let go of his precious memory and sense of vibrant life.

Never, ever, let me go. Please. Even when I am gone.