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December
20, 2009
When Does Death
Start?
Holleigh and Paul Tlapa with their
children (Alexeigh, Aspen and Gage) at a shrine to their daughter Jaiden, who
died at age 8. (Lydia Panas for The New York Times)
By
DARSHAK SANGHAVI
To download the pdf of this article
as seen in the magazine, click here.
R |
obin Beaulieu was telling me about her daughter’s bike accident.
It was an event that would force Beaulieu not only to confront the death of her
child but also to embrace a new way of dying. We were sitting last spring in
the kitchen of her small apartment in Manchester, N.H. Beaulieu took a drag on
a Marlboro, poured a cup of coffee and told me that her daughter, Amanda Panzini,
had been a rambunctious, bighearted teenager. She loved animals, even
“flea-ridden, mangy dogs,” Beaulieu said, and was a fiercely loyal friend. When
confronted by the possibility of donating her brain-injured daughter’s organs
after the accident, Beaulieu never doubted that Amanda would have wanted them
to go to someone who needed them. But Amanda first had to be declared dead, and
in her case, the only way that could happen was if her parents chose a
precisely choreographed death — one conducted by medical personnel in a
hospital procedure meant to allow Amanda to die while preserving her organs.
From this, the doctors and Beaulieu hoped, would come new life.
The last time Beaulieu talked to her daughter was on the morning
of June 21, 2008, a Saturday. Amanda attended an eighth-grade dance the night
before; she told her mother that she had her first kiss there. After Beaulieu
left for work at a nearby minimart, Amanda decided to ride her bike a few
blocks to her friend Kate’s house. She didn’t take her helmet. At the crossing
of Taylor and Young Streets, a Ford F-150 pickup truck slammed into Amanda and
threw her into the street. When the paramedics arrived, Amanda wasn’t
breathing. They inserted a tube into her windpipe and rushed her to Elliot Hospital
nearby. Beaulieu received an emergency call at the minimart; the paramedics had
identified Amanda by the name engraved on her iPod.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a harrowing blur. Beaulieu
remembers a concerned doctor trying to prepare her to see Amanda. She remembers
seeing her child’s swollen face in the emergency room and then being loaded
with her onto a trauma helicopter for transport to Children’s Hospital in
Boston. Though the lighted monitors showed stable vital signs, Beaulieu sensed,
as she hovered in the sky, that her child had died. Doctors in Boston performed
emergency neurosurgery to decompress her
skull, but it was not successful. Amanda was then admitted to an intensive-care
unit and put on life support. Monica Kleinman, the clinical director of the
unit, examined Amanda the next morning. The girl’s cerebral cortex — the part
of the brain where desires, fears and hopes are created — was irreversibly
damaged. In her 20 years of practice (I worked with her as a pediatrics resident years ago),
Kleinman has treated dozens of similar injuries. Few of these patients ever
left the hospital; those who did were in vegetative or otherwise neurologically
devastated states.
Beaulieu, Kleinman recalls, digested the news and “immediately got
it.” Amanda was never coming back. Beaulieu decided to take her off the
ventilator and asked to donate her daughter’s organs. But there was an
obstacle. When Kleinman examined Amanda, she noticed that some primitive and
reflexive neurons of the brainstem were still working. Amanda gagged a bit when
the back of her throat was tickled, and one of her pupils budged slightly when
a flashlight was shined on it. The significance of this information was
immediately apparent to Kleinman: Amanda was not brain-dead.
Organ transplantation must abide by the so-called dead-donor rule:
a person has to be declared dead before any vital organs can be removed. Yet
organs have to be alive if there is any hope of successful transfer to a
recipient. Medical professionals have handled this paradoxical situation —
finding a dead body with live organs — by fashioning a category of people with
beating hearts who are said to be brain-dead, usually after a traumatic head injury, and who are
considered just as dead as if they had rigor mortis.
To diagnose brain death, doctors typically go through a checklist
of about a dozen items, including assessing reflexes like blinking, coughing
and breathing, which are all controlled by the brainstem. The criteria are
extremely strict, and only a tiny fraction of severely brain-injured people
meet them. Kleinman realized that Amanda, despite her severe brain damage, was
not one of them. There was, Kleinman told Beaulieu, another option — one that
was still controversial and had never been pursued successfully at Children’s
Hospital. The procedure was called donation after cardiac death, or D.C.D., and
it would exploit the other way the law defines death: as the “irreversible
cessation” of the heartbeat.
D.C.D. requires doctors to confront the shadowy question of
exactly when somebody dies after the heart stops. To authorize D.C.D., doctors
must follow a strict procedure. Amanda would be taken, technically alive, to an
operating room, where her breathing tube would be removed. If her breathing
ceased naturally and her heart stopped quickly (within an hour), she would be
moved to an adjacent operating room and Kleinman would count off precisely five
minutes, during which time Amanda would be prepped for surgery with antiseptics
and surgical drapes, while Kleinman carefully watched for signs of a returning
heartbeat. If there were none, Amanda would be declared legally dead; the
stoppage would then be considered “irreversible.” Before her organs were
seriously damaged by the lack of oxygen (every minute counts), the surgeons
would rapidly open Amanda’s torso and remove them for transplant.
There was a chance none of this would work. If the comatose girl
didn’t stop breathing in the operating room, she would be returned to the
intensive-care unit, though not put back on life support. Once taken off the
ventilator Amanda would most likely die, but it might take hours or days,
during which time her organs would deteriorate and would be unfit for
transplantation.
Four days after Amanda’s accident, Beaulieu and Amanda’s father,
Dan Panzini, sat in a darkened operating room and said their goodbyes as Amanda
was disconnected from her ventilator. To Beaulieu’s relief, she didn’t breathe
on her own, and her heart gradually slowed. “Amanda’s heart has stopped,”
Kleinman soon said. Amanda’s heart never started again, and the surgeons took
her liver, kidneys and pancreas.
In procuring organs from patients like Amanda, doctors have created
a new class of potential organ donors who are not dead but dying. By
arbitrarily drawing a line between death and life — five minutes after the
heart stops — they have raised difficult ethical questions. Are they merely
acknowledging death or hastening it in their zeal to save others’ lives?
With modern technology like respirators and tube feedings with
synthetic formulas, Beaulieu might have kept her unconscious, brain-damaged
child alive indefinitely. But as she sipped coffee in her apartment from a mug
reading “#1 Mom,” Beaulieu told me that if Amanda had lived, she could “never
bike, rollerblade or go out with friends, and she’d never want that.” If people
with no hope for meaningful recovery can be kept alive artificially, shouldn’t
they also be permitted to die artificially?
S |
ince the inception of organ transplantation a half-century ago,
defining death has taken on both medical and ethical urgency. Before Joseph
Murray performed the world’s first successful kidney transplant in 1954 and
showed that organs could be put to productive use outside their original host,
doctors waited until the deceased was blue and stiff to declare death.
Identifying a precise moment of death was a diversion for eccentric researchers
like Duncan MacDougall, who, in the early 1900s, placed dying patients on a
scale in order to determine when death occurred: the moment they lost
three-quarters of an ounce, the presumed weight of the soul.
The paradox of needing a dead donor with a live body was first
addressed in 1968. Henry Beecher, a Harvard anesthesiologist and medical ethicist, convened a
13-member committee to write a definition of “irreversible coma,” or brain death, for The
Journal of the American Medical Association. Not everyone accepted the
four-page report’s conclusions. After Norman Shumway, a Stanford University surgeon, performed the first American heart transplant from a brain-dead
donor, he was threatened with prosecution by the Santa Clara County coroner. As
a result of the widespread disagreement over the meaning of “brain death,”
President Jimmy
Carter asked a blue-ribbon commission to examine the issue. The
commission culminated in the Uniform Determination of Death Act in 1981, which
defined death as “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain,
including the brainstem.” The procedure to diagnose brain death, however, was
never codified into law, and as a result, it varies from hospital to hospital.
In 1987, the nation’s pediatrics authorities tried to standardize the
diagnosis, listing 14 different criteria to confirm brain death, like the
absence of reflexes, and requiring, under certain conditions, additional X-rays
and tests for brain-wave activity. Last year, in the journal Pediatrics,
researchers from Loma Linda University reported that of 277 brain-dead children
in California who were referred to the regional organ bank over many years,
only a single child received the full set of diagnostic tests.
In 2008, a young Oklahoman named Zack Dunlap was declared
brain-dead after an all-terrain-vehicle accident and was considered for organ
donation. Then, suddenly, he recovered. He later appeared on NBC’s “Today” show. The precise medical details of the case
are not public, but it is possible that a diagnostic error was made because a
checklist was not followed. Dr. Wiley Hall, the director of neurocritical care
at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where I am the
chief of pediatric cardiology, told me about a similar case last year in
Massachusetts; it turned out that a brain scan had been performed improperly.
Such sloppiness is potentially tragic, but it is also exceedingly
rare. Whether or not a checklist is followed, by the time a neurologist is
consulted to assess a critically ill patient for brain death, the odds of
recovery are already minuscule. Doctors see that these patients have begun
dying, and the uncertainty is not about whether it will happen but when. The
families of dying patients often realize this, too, and ask to donate their
relative’s organs. Dr. Robert Truog, a professor of medical ethics at Harvard
Medical School, says he believes this is a situation where “all the ethical
vectors are lined up,” since the patient’s family, the doctors and the
recipient’s family all want to proceed with organ donation. The holdup is that
the patient is not legally dead.
The current shortage of organs gives urgency to any new avenue for
donation. The United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit, coordinates the
nation’s system of organ transplantation. Its Web site maintains a continuously
updated count of people waiting for transplants. As of early this month,
105,172 men, women and children were in line. On an average day, the
organization estimates, 18 people on the list die because they don’t receive an
organ in time. Despite widespread campaigns to encourage donation, availability
has changed only modestly over the past decade — last year there were fewer
than 8,000 deceased donors — while waiting lists have doubled in size.
The small number isn’t because of refusal — to give one example,
85 percent of eligible brain-dead patients’ families in central Massachusetts
chose to donate last year — but because of the rarity of brain death. According
to Kevin O’Connor, a senior vice president at the New England Organ Bank,
improved public-safety laws — automobile safety belts, bicycle
helmets — along with fewer violent crimes, have meant there simply aren’t many
people showing up in hospitals with severe head
injuries and otherwise healthy bodies. At the University of Massachusetts, 238
people were on a transplant waiting list last year, yet our medical center, a
leading source of donated organs in the state, recorded only 19 deceased
donors.
A lack of organs because of better safety and lives saved is, unquestionably,
a good thing. But it means that transplant doctors and patients are forced to
think beyond brain-dead donors. The 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act
also defines death as the “irreversible cessation of circulatory and
respiratory functions,” which left an opening for another source of donors. In
1997, the federal government asked the Institute of Medicine, an independent advisory body, to
gather experts to determine how a dying donor might be treated. The experts
ended up endorsing the procedure for donation after cardiac death, in which
death occurs through a process of withdrawing life support and allowing the
heart to develop “irreversible cessation.”
There were two crucial conditions. First, families could not be
pressured to stop life support; they had to come to the decision on their own,
in consultation with their relative’s doctor. No member of the
organ-procurement team could participate in the family’s decision or declare
death. Second, “irreversible cessation” of cardiac function meant that at least
five minutes had to pass without a heartbeat. That interval was arbitrary — the
panel of experts made no reference to supporting research — and they admitted
that “this recommendation is only an expert judgment.”
The Institute of Medicine created a new class of potential organ
donors: living patients with little hope of recovery who could be declared dead
soon after life-support removal. Within a decade, the number of such donors
increased tenfold; they now account for 8 percent of organ transplants
nationwide, up to 20 percent in certain areas. Still, many hospitals were slow
to adopt the practice.
The case of Children’s Hospital in Boston is instructive. In 2005,
Children’s convened a 17-member task force of doctors, lawyers and health care
professionals to explore the ethics of allowing D.C.D. After two years of
regular meetings, the group was unable to reach a consensus. “The more we
talked about it, the more polarized we became,” recalls Dr. Peter Laussen, a
committee co-chairman. Supporters of D.C.D. argued that the practice was legal
and compatible with families’ wishes. Those opposed worried that caregivers
would see critically ill patients merely as organ donors, and their end-of-life
care could be compromised.
At a certain point in the committee’s debate, members were asked
to mark where they stood on D.C.D. on a continuum, with one end signifying
“totally disagree” and the other “totally agree.” The participants almost
uniformly chose one extreme or the other. There was no middle ground. And then
a few days before Christmas in 2007, an 8-year-old girl named Jaiden Tlapa
ended up in the Children’s Hospital intensive-care unit.
T |
he snow was coming
down quickly in Milford, N.H., and school had been canceled. Holleigh Tlapa
baked cookies for her three children, and then they decided to play outside.
There was a path to the yard, and Holleigh got out the snowblower to clear it.
I visited Tlapa last April. As she started telling me what
happened that day, her voice cracked. She got a box of tissues and continued
talking. She had started the snowblower and the powder began flying. Then — she
doesn’t know exactly what happened — Jaiden somehow lost her footing and fell
into the path of the blower. Instantly, Jaiden was pulled into the powerful
machine, and the strings from her hood tangled tightly around her neck. Tlapa
couldn’t free her daughter no matter how she struggled and pulled. Frantic, she
called 911. It seemed like an eternity before the paramedics arrived. It took
them several minutes to cut Jaiden free. Placed on a respirator, the comatose
child was later taken by ambulance to Children’s Hospital in Boston.
For a moment on Christmas Eve, Jaiden opened her eyes, but her
parents recall that they were “vacant.” She never opened them again. The weeks
rolled by. Repeated brain scans showed severe brain shrinkage. Despite her
devastating cortical injury, however, Jaiden had a few primitive brainstem
reflexes that kept her from being classified as brain-dead. “She looked normal,
so you would assume consciousness, but that was misleading,” Tlapa told me.
Over time Holleigh Tlapa and her husband, Paul, realized Jaiden
wouldn’t get better, and they asked about organ donation. Because she wasn’t
brain-dead, D.C.D. was the only option. Although the task force at Children’s
disagreed about D.C.D., the hospital drafted a protocol. The Tlapas were told
about the disagreement, but they chose to proceed. On Jan. 13, 2008, a dying
but not dead organ donor was brought to the operating room and prepped for
withdrawal of support for the first time in the hospital’s history. Holleigh
and Paul lay in their daughter’s bed and played Jaiden’s favorite Miley
Cyrus song as the breathing tube was removed. They held their
daughter and waited.
There’s something remarkable about such families. I’ve known
hundreds of parents whose children are stricken by terrible diseases. For many,
the gravity of the situation is so overwhelming that they withdraw into
themselves, letting no emotion escape, and then suddenly explode into a
supernova of blame and anger. But there are others on whom this terrible
pressure exerts a metamorphic power that turns some of their sadness into a
compassion that is strong and diamond-brilliant.
Though her gasps were irregular, Jaiden didn’t stop breathing
entirely. After an hour her heart hadn’t stopped, and, in this situation, the
hospital protocol called for the patient to be returned to the intensive-care
unit. The chance to donate her organs was over. Jaiden continued to take
shallow breaths into the next morning, and then her heart finally stopped. She
was legally dead. “It was so hurtful that she died so soon after,” Tlapa said,
disappointed that Jaiden’s organs died with her. Still, she finds solace in
knowing that Jaiden at least helped change some attitudes among skeptics and
paved the way for the first successful D.C.D. procedure at Children’s Hospital
— the one involving Amanda Panzini. (Holleigh also founded a charity to help
families facing similar decisions.)
Paul has some difficulty understanding why, if Jaiden was going to
die anyway, she could not have been put under general anesthesia, undergone surgery to
donate her organs, and then been declared dead. Removing the breathing tube to
attempt D.C.D. had the same effect, only it took much longer and Jaiden
breathed irregularly for many hours, which seemed to Paul more distressing. “If
it was all up to me,” he explained, “I would have said, ‘Take her organs.’ ”
As Gary Greenberg wrote in The New Yorker, donating organs in such a manner,
deliberately and with anesthesia, could simply be “a particular way to finish
our dying, at the hands of a surgeon, after some uncertain border has been
crossed.” But Francis Delmonico, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical
School and a national leader in organ transplantation, fervently defends the
need to establish death before removing organs. “I understand a family’s
anguish and inability to have consolation when a child doesn’t die after
removal of life support,” he explains, “but I don’t see this as a
patients’-rights issue. It’s a matter of public trust in the system.”
Donation after cardiac death already arouses suspicion. Just as
transplant surgeons like Norman Shumway were once harassed for procuring organs
from brain-dead donors, a California-based surgeon, Hootan Roozrokh, was tried
for dependent-adult abuse, a felony, after participating in an attempted D.C.D.
A nurse who objected to the proceedings later registered a complaint about how
painkillers were administered to the patient. Prosecutors charged him with
trying to hasten the patient’s death. Though none of this held up in court —
Roozrokh was acquitted last year — the trial left many transplant surgeons
shaken. Just think of the outcry, Delmonico cautions, if families and doctors
also decided it was acceptable to euthanize patients to procure their organs.
“You would destroy organ donation in this country,” he said.
Delmonico certainly has a point about the importance of
maintaining the public’s trust, but it’s hard to witness an actual D.C.D.
procedure without conceding that the process of declaring death in any setting
is inherently arbitrary. I saw this myself when I was permitted to observe a
D.C.D. procedure at the University of Massachusetts hospital. The patient was a
middle-aged woman with no close family ties who had been committed years before
to a psychiatric hospital. Found unconscious after choking on French toast, she
received CPR and came to the UMass intensive-care unit. She remained comatose
with severe brain injury for days but was not brain-dead. Following hospital
regulations, the doctors reported an “impending death” to the New England Organ
Bank, which agreed she would be a suitable donor. (These reports are mandatory,
on the theory that they ensure no donation opportunities are missed.) Faced
with the grave prognosis from the woman’s doctors, her state-appointed guardian
consented to donation after cardiac death.
The woman was wheeled to the step-down unit next to the operating
rooms, prepped for surgery and covered with sterile sheets. With a medical
student, a representative from the organ bank and me looking on, a nurse practitioner from the
intensive-care unit supervised the removal of the breathing tube at 9:16 p.m.
The patient didn’t breathe. We gazed intently at the portable monitor at the
foot of her bed, which showed her heart’s electrical rhythm, oxygen level and blood pressure. By 9:18, her
oxygen level fell from 95 percent to 60 percent. By 9:21, the oxygen level fell
further to 22 percent, but her heart rate stayed normal at 74
beats per minute. At 9:25, her blood pressure dipped a little, her oxygen level
was zero — which meant her blood was becoming acidic and possibly harming her
organs — but her heart rate was still 62 beats per minute.
Watching someone die, observing her heart struggle and ultimately
fail over the course of a half-hour, brought home how death occurs in its own
way, at its own idiosyncratic pace. There is no escaping the tragedy of the
moment. I thought about Jaiden and Amanda, and their stories together with this
woman’s seemed an endless loop of sorrow.
At 9:32, the woman’s heart still beat 60 times per minute, though
she was blue and unresponsive. At 9:38 her heart rate was 20, and then she
flat-lined. Immediately, a stopwatch was started to count the five minutes
before death could be declared.
The woman was wheeled to the operating room, where the surgeons
were assembled. Three minutes passed without any heartbeat, and then four, then
four and a half. There was silence. It was the nurse practitioner’s sole
responsibility to declare death without any interference from the transplant
surgeon. Suddenly, there was a single blip on the heart monitor. The blip was
almost certainly an artifact of some outside electrical interference and not a
true heartbeat, but it was hard to tell for sure. Five minutes had passed, and
every delay meant the organs were more starved for oxygen.
The nurse practitioner hesitated as she considered whether to call
the death or restart the five-minute count, and then she made her decision. She
looked at her watch and called out, “Time of death was 21:44.” A flurry of
activity began as the surgeons called for their instruments and the operating
room sprang to life. There was no anesthesiologist at the head of the bed, so I
stood there as the team prepared to make the incision. Suddenly, Dr. Adel
Bozorgzadeh, the attending transplant surgeon, raised his hands. “Let us take a
moment of silence and consider the gift that is being given on this day,” he
said. A few seconds passed. Then he brought the knife down.
L |
ike Amanda Panzini, the teenager hit by the truck, the patient I
observed bequeathed several abdominal organs, but not her heart. Although the
liver and kidneys are relatively hardy and can withstand the five minutes of
oxygen starvation before removal, the wait seriously damages the more delicate
heart and renders it unusable. Heart transplants thus call only for brain-dead
donors, whose hearts are still beating until just moments before they’re
removed.
This, it was thought, was the only way to get a viable heart. But
a pediatric cardiologist named Mark Boucek at Denver Children’s Hospital was
growing tired of watching young children with incurable heart defects die. In
2004, financed by a federal grant, Boucek wrote a far more aggressive D.C.D.
protocol that would save the heart, which was adopted after going through the
hospital’s review process. His version had two key innovations. First, large
intravenous lines would be placed in the donor’s groin before death, to enable the
donor’s entire blood volume to be replaced with a refrigerated salt
preservative when it was time to remove the heart. Second, and most
controversially, Boucek, who has since died from pancreatic cancer, rejected the
five-minute rule imposed by the Institute of Medicine and initially picked
three minutes instead; after all, no law had codified a particular time period.
But David Campbell, the pediatric cardiac surgeon at Denver who procured the
first heart using the protocol, realized that even three minutes was too long.
“When we opened the chest and pericardium, the heart was distended and blue,”
he told me. Upon transfer to the recipient, the heart failed to work well
initially and required the child to remain on a dangerous heart-lung bypass
machine for several days. “That’s why I asked that we move the time down lower,”
Campbell said. In reviewing the medical literature, Boucek found the longest
recorded time that a heart had ever stopped and then spontaneously restarted
without medical intervention was 65 seconds. If the law required “irreversible”
cessation of heart function, Boucek concluded, there was no reason to wait much
longer than that.
Waiting just over a minute after cardiac arrest to declare death
was unprecedented. Last year, when the Denver specialists published their
provocative case reports in The New England Journal of Medicine,
many observers assailed their work and called it a back-door method of
performing euthanasia.
Robert Veatch, a professor of medical ethics at Georgetown University, calls the Denver doctors “lone wolves,”
and he categorically rejects heart transplantation using D.C.D. because he
maintains that a donor heart cannot have “irreversible” cessation. After all,
it works fine after it’s transplanted. Veatch is especially concerned about a
potential public outrcry against organ donation. “I spent all morning today
dealing with conservative right-to-life scholars all worked up about stem cells,” he told me recently,
adding that he could only imagine their reaction to taking hearts from
“helpless little babies.”
The first baby whose heart was donated under the much-shortened
wait period was a newborn girl named Addison Grooms in 2007. Her parents, David
and Jill Grooms, have no tolerance for Veatch’s viewpoint. Addison’s brain was
severely damaged in a complication from delivery. “There was no chance at all
that our daughter was going to survive,” says David, whose brother died of a
malformed heart as a baby. “I can follow the ethicist’s argument, but it seems
totally ludicrous.” Had the couple found out another child died because they
weren’t allowed to donate Addison’s heart, it would be “like another slap in
our faces.” Further, both parents would have permitted simply taking out
Addison’s heart under complete general anesthesia — without the intermediate
process of the choreographed death — which would have been a painless way to
end their child’s life, had it been legal.
Three months after Addison’s death, a neuroscientist named Lori
Driscoll gave birth to a son, Liam, with a catastrophic injury similar to Addison’s,
and he was also transferred to Denver Children’s. Testing showed that almost
every part of Liam’s brain was destroyed, though some primitive reflexes remained. Lori
and her husband consented to Boucek’s novel protocol. They accompanied Liam to
the operating room, where the breathing tube was removed. They held his hand
for 10 minutes until his heart stopped.
M |
oving past a binary
concept of life and death is, for most of us, an uncomfortable process. It’s
worth considering how various cultures think about the beginning of life.
Tibetan monks believe a new life begins around the time of a mating couple’s
orgasm; many Catholics posit that it starts at the union of an egg and sperm;
Roe v. Wade effectively established a legal threshold of life at 24 weeks of
fetal gestation; some consider meaningful life to begin at birth; the Navajo
think a baby is fully human when it laughs for the first time. If the emergence
of life occurs on a continuum, perhaps the same is true of life’s recession.
Still, preserving the notion that the transition from life to
death can be clearly defined may be a fundamentally necessary fiction. Though
no religious organizations or right-to-life groups have yet mounted any
opposition to D.C.D., including the Denver protocol, it is important to change
practices in deliberate steps that give decision makers clear rules of action
and establish gradual consensus.
Lori Driscoll, for one, is grateful for the changes Boucek made to
the D.C.D. protocol. After her baby Liam died, she was told that a 3-month-old
girl received his heart. That infant was prepped for surgery for her new heart
in the room adjacent to the one where Liam died. The surgery went well. Months
later, Driscoll learned that recipient was a girl with the uncommon first name
Annika. She did some sleuthing and found Annika’s mother’s MySpace
page. The women exchanged photos, arranging to meet last year. Driscoll
fantasized about running up to Annika, holding her close and placing her ear
over the toddler’s chest to again hear her son’s steady heartbeat and feel his
presence. But something unexpected happened when she met the girl. “It was the
most amazing thing to see her thriving,” she said, and her initial emotional
rush “had nothing to do with Liam.” For a moment, the weight of the past was
forgotten as Driscoll marveled at the healthy little person before her.
Darshak Sanghavi,
the chief of pediatric cardiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical
School, is Slate’s health care columnist and the author of “A Map of the Child:
A Pediatrician’s Tour of the Body.”