Word: transplanter
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...years old when Christiaan Barnard performed the first heart transplant. I still have the LIFE magazine cover. My dad was a cardiologist, so the drama carried out in the public's imagination was reinforced by my respect for the practice of medicine and discovery. My ultimate choice of going into surgery and then into heart surgery and then heart transplantation I trace back to that single operation...
...coyote to smuggle Jesica and themselves into the U.S., where they hoped to find help for the dying girl. There was the wealthy philanthropist Mack Mahoney, who read of Jesica's plight in a North Carolina paper and made it his mission to get her a heart-and-lung transplant to try to save her life. Finally, there was the venerable institution where the story would unfold, Duke University Hospital, renowned for the brilliance and dexterity of its surgeons...
...over the next few days, Jesica suffered seizure after seizure and was sustained only by life-support machines. Her new heart, ravaged by the immune assault, started to fail, and Jesica's tale turned from the stuff of American mythology into that of American tragedy. After a rare second transplant, doctors on Saturday told her parents Jesica was brain dead...
...down twice: when the surgeon, Dr. James Jaggers, instead of checking, assumed that the blood type of the donated organs matched Jesica's and when he failed to verbally confirm that assumption with Carolina Donor Services, the organ-donor agency. "Jesica's case has clearly sent a warning to transplant centers," says Dr. David Yuh, a transplant surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md., where the transplant staff is double-checking its own organ-matching processes...
...Still, the Santillan tragedy will prompt transplant patients and their families to wonder, now more than ever, how they can guard against potentially fatal medical errors. As any patient knows, it's bad enough going into the hospital; the last thing you want to worry about is doctors or support staff making a disastrous mistake. John Schochor, an attorney in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. who specializes in medical malpractice cases, offers this advice, not only to transplant patients, but to anyone entering a hospital for an invasive procedure...