Word: livers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jamie Fiske, 11 months old, had one thing in common with three-year-old Justine Pinheiro, and that disappeared on an operating table in Minneapolis. On Nov. 5 the baby daughter of Charles and Marilyn Fiske of Bridgewater, Mass., underwent six hours of surgery that gave her a new liver and a good chance to recover from biliary atresia, a congenital liver defect that generally leads to death before the age of four. Justine Pinheiro is still waiting for a transplant to give her the same chance. The disparity in their fates raises one of the thorniest ethical questions facing...
Jamie Fiske had received her liver because of a remarkably skillful publicity campaign launched by her parents. Says Charles Fiske: "We thought we had a license to make Jamie's needs known by any means we could." As a hospital administrator, Fiske knew just where to turn. He telegraphed 500 pediatricians. He placed an appeal in a newsletter that reaches emergency room staffs in 1,000 hospitals. Then, with lobbying assistance from Senator Edward Kennedy, House Speaker Tip O'Neill and CBS Anchorman Dan Rather, all of whom he contacted, Fiske persuaded the American Academy of Pediatrics...
...tactic worked. Fiske's plea was covered by all three networks and newspapers across the country. The families of some 500 would-be donors phoned the University of Minnesota Hospital, where Jamie lay waiting. Two offers turned out to be useful. One, a liver from a three-year-old on the East Coast, was not suitable for Jamie, but it saved the life of an older transplant patient at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. The second organ came from a ten-month-old boy killed in a car-train collision in Utah. His father, Laird Bellon...
...ethics of Jamie Fiske's case were complicated by two facts: her parents had the resources and skills to find their own donor, and the donor's family specified that the liver of their child should go to Jamie, and Jamie alone. Once the organ was made available, doctors did use the A.M.A. guidelines. There were four babies at Pittsburgh equally suited to the transplant, but none had a greater need than Jamie. In addition, doctors at Pittsburgh were already busy with a liver transplant and could not handle a second one. "If another child had been...
DIED. Thomas Thompson, 49, author of nonfiction blockbusters (Blood and Money, Serpentine) and, this year, a bestselling first novel (Celebrity); of liver cancer; in Los Angeles. As a reporter and entertainment editor for LIFE in the 1960s, Thompson developed a hunger for details and an acquaintance with the glamorous, a combination that he cannily adapted to books by conducting extensive research into murderous scandals of the rich and then spinning them into absorbing narratives that were eagerly devoured by readers and moviemakers alike...