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Last year, I was given access to a hospital where an organ donation surgery was about to take place at the request of the hospital itself, as it hoped to make the reality of the medical procedure more widely known.
I was granted permission to write a story on the condition that neither the hospital nor the donor would be identified. It is extremely unusual for a reporter to be allowed such access.
“I will be in charge of removing the heart.”
“The removed organ will be transported along this route.”
An hour before the start of the organ removal, which took place on a weekend, about 30 doctors and nurses gathered for a meeting in the operating theater. They had come from hospitals all over the country, which were to perform transplants of different organs into patients waiting for them. Surgeons from the hospitals where those operations take place were in charge of harvesting each organ. The meeting lasted about 20 minutes, during which those in charge were introduced, and the procedure was confirmed.
The patient who became the donor had been brought in by ambulance, but despite the best efforts of the medical team at that time, their lost brain function could not be recovered. Upon the doctor explaining to the family that the patient’s condition was unlikely to improve, the family decided to donate the patient’s organs, as the person had previously expressed a wish to donate their organs to others.
In an effort to save the patients on the transplant waiting lists, the organs must be quickly removed and transported. A race against time began.
About 30 minutes before the start of the removal surgery, the donor was brought in on a bed from another room. Relatives and friends sobbed and said their farewells in front of the operating theater.
Medical teams formed for each organ removal all entered the operating theater. The doctors and nurses who had earlier treated the donor were also present.
“Organ donation is possible with the understanding and cooperation of the entire hospital,” said an emergency doctor at the hospital where the removal surgery took place.
After obtaining final consent from the donor’s family and others, a silent prayer was offered to the donor, and the removal surgery began.
As soon as the heart was successfully removed in about an hour and a half, the heart transplant team put the organ into a cooler and carried it out quickly.
The doctor in charge of the heart removal bowed to the family and friends in the waiting room and said, “We will treat it with great care.” The family members and others each caressed the cooler before sending it off.
The removal of other organs such as the lungs and liver followed, and the surgery ended in about four hours. It is desirable to transplant the heart in the recipient within four hours of removal, the lungs within eight hours, and the liver and small intestine within 12 hours.
In many cases when a long journey is expected to the hospital where the transplant will be completed, a police car will escort a vehicle carrying the organ to the airport or train station. On the day when I was present, the hospital did request a police escort for one of the organs because there was little time for transport.
Even as the removal surgery continued, the transplant surgeries for the donated organs simultaneously began at their respective hospitals.
Later I learned that the transplants of all the removed organs had been completed and that the transplanted heart started beating again inside the recipient patient at around the same time as the entire removal surgery ended.
“I believe that respecting donors’ wishes to the fullest extent is doctors’ mission. I am involved in the work of organ donation with this in mind,” said the emergency doctor. “I hope the actual situation of organ transplants will become more widely known, so that society as a whole can express its gratitude to donors and their families.”
