A liver transplant from start to finish

Summary

‍On a Saturday night in autumn, an ambulance slid out of a large hospital’s emergency cul-de-sac and silently hit the road. Three of us sat facing each other in the back.Dr. Johanna Lee,1 in red ear warmers and a waterproof jacket, looked like she was going skiing. “Trudy,” she was saying. “Long time no see! What’s it been, two weeks?” Trudy, a sturdy middle-aged woman with big, no-nonsense blue eyes in sweatpants and an old fleece, was dressed as if she were running out to get the mail. But we were doing neither. We were going out to save a life.We picked up speed on the highway. It was just before 11:00 pm, and the roads were empty. Our suitcases rattled on the stretcher along with an empty picnic cooler, big enough to hold some fifty cans of Coke. It was impossible to hear each other over the sound of clinking medical equipment, so Dr. Lee and Trudy showed me pictures on their phones. The women’s albums looked the same: food, flowers, healthy livers, diseased livers, pediatric livers, and livers of unusual sizes.The ambulance didn’t take us to the closest public airport, but to the single lobby of the private charter, deep in the dark nothingness of Middle America. As we waited, we were joined by a young resident named Julia. From there, the four of us were ferried in our shiny black SUV to our private plane, a King Air 350. I felt like the President, walking up an airstair as part of an entourage as midnight approached.Once inside, I buckled my seatbelt, so close to the pilot that I was practically in the cockpit. No one stopped talking during liftoff. Only I seemed nervous.As the only non-surgical personnel who would be taking part in the transplant, I had every reason to be. I was simply someone who, in 2022, had reached out to a hospital about observing a transplant while researching the liver’s cultural history in my graduate nonfiction program. Initially surprised when my request was granted, I now know that most of those involved with liver transplants wis...