by Josephine Varnier
On a chilly November morning a 70-year-old woman is wheeled into an operation room and set up in the sterile room full of scalpels located on the fifth floor of the east wing in the Main hospital at the Medical Center of Virginia.
Aside from being overweight, the woman appeared otherwise healthy. Doctors probably noticed that she may have never smoked, tended to make good food choices and were a moderate drinker.
“A lot of things go into what gets a patient chosen, and she must have been the next healthiest one on the list,” says Katherine Hopper, nursing student.
Yet, here she was at 7:30 a.m. preparing to undergo a kidney transplant, one of the 18,695 patients who have received an organ transplant this year.
“We don’t choose who get’s a transplant. Everyone is on a national waiting list,” Maureen Bell, kidney transplant coordinator explains.
The United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, produces a print out for every organ received which includes a list of patients eligible. Age, race and gender are not factors that affect one’s eligibility.
In January 2007 the Hume-Lee Transplant center at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Medical Center had 94,500 patients waiting for organs, 69,000 awaiting a kidney. Of those waiting, 24,000 transplants were completed between the months of January and October.
Getting the kidney, however, isn’t always easy. For example, in the 70-year-old woman’s case, she undergoes anesthesia and is prepped for surgery. However, the anesthesiologists learn that the kidney had yet to be approved.
Kidneys can live without a body on a pump or in a bucket of ice for up to 24-48 hours. The kidney that was arriving had been on a pump for a considerable amount of time and sometimes upon arrival organs are deemed unusable by the surgeons.
The O.R. was in a panic with the news and those who had been setting up were upset, wondering how to wake up a woman and tell her she did not receive the organ she needed to live. That she had been living in the pre-surgery unit, or P.S.U., to just be returned to home and back onto a waiting list.
Would the amount of time she would spend waiting for a donor be longer than her expected lifespan without one?
Bell feels that the chance of not proceeding with surgery would have been next to none.
“I can’t think of a case where the organ arrives and it can’t be used,” Bell states. “We already have a lot of information on the kidney before it arrives. However the surgeons still like to look at it.”
Approximately 30 minutes after the tension erupted, it was subsided with the news that the surgeons had checked the kidney that had just arrived and it was good to go.
But how often is it not? The information that must be passed from operation room, to doctor, to patient is a stream of detrimental facts that serve as the lifeline for the surgery as well as the patient. And once a date is pushed back, does one’s place on the waiting list follow suit?
To learn more go to…
http://www.unos.org/
http://www.ustransplant.org/kars.aspxhttp://www.organdonor.gov/
http://www.optn.org/http://www.ustransplant.org/http://www.ustransplant.org/
On a chilly November morning a 70-year-old woman is wheeled into an operation room and set up in the sterile room full of scalpels located on the fifth floor of the east wing in the Main hospital at the Medical Center of Virginia.
Aside from being overweight, the woman appeared otherwise healthy. Doctors probably noticed that she may have never smoked, tended to make good food choices and were a moderate drinker.
“A lot of things go into what gets a patient chosen, and she must have been the next healthiest one on the list,” says Katherine Hopper, nursing student.
Yet, here she was at 7:30 a.m. preparing to undergo a kidney transplant, one of the 18,695 patients who have received an organ transplant this year.
“We don’t choose who get’s a transplant. Everyone is on a national waiting list,” Maureen Bell, kidney transplant coordinator explains.
The United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, produces a print out for every organ received which includes a list of patients eligible. Age, race and gender are not factors that affect one’s eligibility.
In January 2007 the Hume-Lee Transplant center at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Medical Center had 94,500 patients waiting for organs, 69,000 awaiting a kidney. Of those waiting, 24,000 transplants were completed between the months of January and October.
Getting the kidney, however, isn’t always easy. For example, in the 70-year-old woman’s case, she undergoes anesthesia and is prepped for surgery. However, the anesthesiologists learn that the kidney had yet to be approved.
Kidneys can live without a body on a pump or in a bucket of ice for up to 24-48 hours. The kidney that was arriving had been on a pump for a considerable amount of time and sometimes upon arrival organs are deemed unusable by the surgeons.
The O.R. was in a panic with the news and those who had been setting up were upset, wondering how to wake up a woman and tell her she did not receive the organ she needed to live. That she had been living in the pre-surgery unit, or P.S.U., to just be returned to home and back onto a waiting list.
Would the amount of time she would spend waiting for a donor be longer than her expected lifespan without one?
Bell feels that the chance of not proceeding with surgery would have been next to none.
“I can’t think of a case where the organ arrives and it can’t be used,” Bell states. “We already have a lot of information on the kidney before it arrives. However the surgeons still like to look at it.”
Approximately 30 minutes after the tension erupted, it was subsided with the news that the surgeons had checked the kidney that had just arrived and it was good to go.
But how often is it not? The information that must be passed from operation room, to doctor, to patient is a stream of detrimental facts that serve as the lifeline for the surgery as well as the patient. And once a date is pushed back, does one’s place on the waiting list follow suit?
To learn more go to…
http://www.unos.org/
http://www.ustransplant.org/kars.aspxhttp://www.organdonor.gov/
http://www.optn.org/http://www.ustransplant.org/http://www.ustransplant.org/
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