A last tribute to those who will give their organs

Tim Lahey is an infectious disease specialist and director of clinical ethics in the Medical Center of the University of Vermont.

The double doors of the surgical intensive care unit were opening on a crowded corridor of dozens of hospital employees. From there came a stretcher and we all got shut.

Most stretchers coming out of the intensive care unit are rushing to radiology or at the operating room, buzzing with beeps and monitors' lights and hasty conversations of busy nurses.

This stretcher was different. He was moving slowly and the team accompanying him was also behaving differently. The nurses led it, but this time there was no discussion. An anesthetist leaned over the head of the stretcher to squeeze the oxygen mask with the precision of a watch.

Behind the stretcher, a group of people without uniforms advanced without knowing where to look. They were the parents of the young woman on the stretcher to whom we had all come to pay homage.

It was a "tribute tour" for a scary patient who was about to give her organs to other people.

It does not matter whether it's Idaho, Tennessee or Oregon, Hospitals Across The United States Organize Commemorative Visits To Honor The Last Contribution Of A Patient.

With the permission of your loved ones and the operating room, ready to donate organs, the board of directors of the hospital invites all members of your staff to participate. In my hospital, the Vermont University Medical Center, theThe different uniforms of the crowd reflected the work that everyone had left on a break to pay tributeThere were white coats and ties, crumpled blue surgical clothes, curved cups, and expensive striped suits. A priest wearing a neon pink Hawaiian shirt on his collar looked up, looked down the hall and smiled.

The homage journey takes place during a strange break between life and death, whether said the brain death of a donor whose heart is still beating or whose heart is about to stop beating.

I watched the woman on the stretcher. His eyes were closed. His skin was yellowish. He wore the clbadic hospital gown and an identification bracelet. Intravenous tubes and telemetry cables continued to meander through the bed. Everything seemed superfluous, in the last minutes of a life whose end was already determined.

A tribute tour is a powerful act of community. There is something solemn, even sacred, that happens in these fifteen minutes in the hall. We hope and talk to people from all walks of life and all walks of life. Together we honor a great sacrifice. We thank. We hope to help a distressed family in a moment of unfathomable loss.

Jennifer DeMaroney is a coordinator of organ donations who brought the tribute tours to my hospital in a very unconventional way. Instead of doing so through the Byzantine committees of the multi-billion dollar hospital bureaucracy, DeMaroney says that He broke into the office of the president of the hospital, Eileen Whalen, with the photo of a tribute made in another state, asking if we could do the same.

Whalen, who worked as an emergency nurse and was chairman of the board of directors of the Center for Donation and Transplantation New York and Vermont, He approved our first tribute tour immediately.

Whalen mentioned that it was a simple decision. I wanted to give families in mourning a kind of compensation and that all would help these families to bear their loss. He agreed with DeMaroney that the tribute tour tells families that "We believe that those who donate their organs to save a life are heroes."

We need these heroes … desperately. The United Organ Sharing Network calculates that more than 113,000 people are waiting for a transplant. Every year, more and more people donate their organs; even like that, In 2017, about 6,500 people on the waiting list are dead.

I spoke to Missy Holliday, director of organ operations at LifeCenter in Cincinnati, where a tribute tour drew the attention of social media. Holliday said that LifeCenter began organizing tribute tours in December 2017 in response, in part, to nurses in the intensive care unit., who wanted to honor previous patients who had donated their organs.

Staff learned that it was convenient to place a chair in the hallway the day of a tribute tour in case a family member would need a while to sit down and sit down. cry and receive support.

The ritual is already part of popular culture: last week, an episode of Gray's Anatomy He adapted the hallway ceremony to a powerful scene about a victim of badual badault.

Back at my hospital, as we watched the stretcher move away from the woman, we knew that a private ritual would begin soon. In a way, his parents would do him the last farewell. Then, in an operating room lit by bright lights and equipped with all the high-tech tools of modern surgery, a surgeon with masks he would put his hands on the still warm body of a young woman to turn the devastating loss of a family into a new hope for countless strangers.

Tim Lahey is an infectious disease specialist and director of clinical ethics at the University of Vermont Medical Center.

* Copyright: 2019 The New York Times News Service