Harvest

I was talking to one of our charge nurses earlier this week about how we get organs for our patients and how difficult it is to coordinate a "harvest" (that is what they call it when they take the organ out of the donor) because of all the people and all the steps involved and how you only have so many hours between taking a heart out of a donor and getting it into a recipient. She said that I should go watch one sometime, but then we talked about how hard that is to plan because you never really know when (or where) and organ is going to become available. I worked the day shift on Monday and then met up with dad and Julie (who are in town for New Years) for dinner. We were about halfway done when I got a call from our transplant fellow, Dave, asking if I wanted to come with him to harvest a heart in Reno that night! Who cares about sleep! I met him and a med student (Saba) at UCLA at 11:45pm where a limo picked us up to take us to a private jet. Apparently someone did the math and figured out it was cheaper (and more comfortable) for us to ride in a limo than an ambulance :) We then flew to Reno (about an hour) where another limo was waiting to take us to the donor hospital. We arrived around 2:00am, waited for the other surgical teams to arrive (who were coming in from all over the eastern US to harvest the other organs) and then began the surgery around 2:30am. We reversed our path and were back to LA around 6:30am. I opted out of watching the implant since I had been up for about 24 hours at this point and instead headed out to meet dad and Julie for breakfast... it was an AMAZING night!