Friday, October 10, 2008

Transplant Hell continued

I try to remind myself that transplant surgeons are not intrinsically evil. I have seen almost exclusively the 20% of liver transplant patients that die long and horrible deaths. Perhaps if I saw more of the other 80% I would feel better about it all. It is all somehow ghoulish though. I am not able to get comfortable with it. Has Mr. Jones been reduced to the mentality of a caged animal by the influence of his disease, or has he realized too late that he is being flushed down the drain of modern medicine with no expense spared? Why shouldn’t he see us as his enemies? He was not told of this possibility which is now his hellish life. I have spoken with a few patients whose liver transplants did not go bad. They had no idea how things could have been. What were the statistics for Vioxx? One in how many hundreds of thousands died? For liver transplants it is one in five. And the Vioxx people dropped dead suddenly. They did not suffer over weeks and months like these transplant patients do. Yet we never hear about the transplant patients in the media - just calls for more donors.

Here is another concern – Mr. Jones was probably still in fairly good health before his transplant. The healthier the patient is, the better his chances after transplant, so the surgeons do not like to wait for their patients to get ill. When laboratory tests and scans show that the liver is likely to fail, the patient is encouraged to sign up for the transplant. The transplant takes place while they are still in good shape which leaves open the question as to how many good weeks, months or years they would have had without the procedure.

Then there is the donation process. Nurses I have spoken with who have assisted with organ harvest express deep discomfort with it. It is by all accounts a bloody mess. The nurses complain that the doctors are not properly respectful of the donor bodies. I wonder if it is possible to respectfully cut a liver out of a functioning body. There is also generally a lot of joking around that goes on in the OR. I imagine that this could seem very different when you do not expect the patient to get better at the end of it all.

A lot of money generated from these organs. Transplantation must be a billion dollar industry. The surgeons are no doubt well paid, but the industry also supports a host of coordinators, “counselors” who speak with the families of potential donors (do they get to keep their jobs if they are not good at getting families to donate?), nursing staff, clerks etc. The ICU nurses also care for the donors bodies as one-to-one or even two-to-one patients because of all of the extra lab work and medications that are required for maintenance and preparation of the bodies. Again, these nurses would generally rather be spending their time on a patient that has a chance of getting better - and that is without even considering that the recipient might not do well. So many livelihoods are at stake. Shall we pretend that no one is influenced by this?

I once saw a candidate for organ harvest being evaluated by a surgeon. The patient had been a two-pack-a-day smoker for twenty years and the surgeons were considering taking his lungs for transplant because he had a small frame and small lungs are in high demand for young cystic fibrosis patients. The patient had suffered from a heart condition, but they were considering taking his heart as well. In the end it did not happen. I heard the surgeon talking on the phone saying that he would do the harvest, except that he had never done it before and had only observed once. He did not feel comfortable doing the procedure on his own and there was no one else available at the time.

The unfortunate liver transplant recipients suffer through liver failure and organ rejection at the same time. If they stabilize, they may be confined to bed, weak, of disturbed mind, swollen and in pain. These are the patients who beg for death and their pleas are almost always ignored. The surgeons seem to live with themselves by not contemplating the cases that go bad. They make their daily rounds and encourage the family members to remain hopeful. ‘We just have to get on top of the latest infection. Maybe he will only need dialysis temporarily.’ The family members somehow keep their faith in the surgeons and become callous to their loved one’s pleas (he is feeling weak, who could blame him? but I will be strong for him). These patients pull on anything they can get their hands on. They will rip the feeding tubes right out of their stomachs. The nurses, who are often the most sympathetic to their wishes, are also the ones who have to make sure they are tied tightly at all times.

Once I found myself yelling at one such patient whom I had untied for a short period in the hopes of giving him more freedom. “Stop pulling on that! If you don’t, I am just going to have to tie you up again!” I felt someone watching me and turned around to find the adult son of the woman in the next room giving me an icy stare. How could I explain it to him? The next day I was filling out a job satisfaction survey. I was surprised to find the question, “Do you feel your work is hardening you emotionally?” I was even more surprised as I found myself clicking on “strongly agree.”

3 comments:

Devadeva Mirel said...

check this out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/health/19doctor.html?ref=health

Unknown said...

I have worked in a Transplant ICU for more than 9 years. We transplant all solid organs but the majority of organs that are transplanted are livers. I would paint a completely different picture than you have. Most of my patients fully recover and have the opportunity to live much fuller lives than before their transplant. The patients who receive transplants are usually very sick and after transplantation begin to look and feel much better within 24-48 hours. Some patients do go into rejection but usually not immediately and it is usually handled fairly easily with anti-rejection medications. They do many times come to us with elevated ammonia levels that cause them to become encephalopathic which requires a laxative (lactulose) to help decrease the ammonia levels in their bodies. Of course, this will result in loose stools that will need to be contained or cleaned up. Our outcomes are usually very good and our patients very thankful for the opportunity for a "second chance." I'm so glad I work where I do and that my experiences are different than yours.

Leo Levy said...

Thanks for your comment. I have never worked in a transplant unit. My experiences with liver transplants have all been in MICU and SICU. My impression has always been that the patients we received from the transplant units were moved out so as not to affect the moral of the transplant units. My sample is therefore negatively skewed. The publicly available statistics that I have seen say that 1 out of 5 liver transplant patients do not survive four years after transplant. Since you seem to have no experience of this, you sample would seem to be positively skewed. Please see the link on my sidebar "What the Doc Didn't Tell Me" for accounts from a liver transplant survivor who happens to appreciate this blog.