Caltrops - American McGee's Stay Alive





	[quote name="laudablepuss"][quote name="Just Another Mysterious Stranger"]That's a great story, and at the very end of the zone of likely/possible for these situations. Actually, it's basically not-possible that you lived and got transplanted. I do a lot of volunteer service in the local transplant community, and the stories are pretty wild as a rule, but yours wins the A. Pismo Clam Award for Unlikeliest Survivor. I guess the main advantage to having a fulminating hepatitis situation like yours is that your body (the rest of it) was basically very strong and healthy, and you didn't spend an eternity on a waiting list, getting sicker. That's a huge advantage. But the rest of it: unreal. Your choices: (a) buy a lottery ticket. You're freakishly lucky and you'll win. (b) don't buy a lottery ticket ever again. Your allotment of luck has been used up for this lifetime and you'll anger the gods.[/quote] Fortunately, I don't believe in fate so I don't mind tempting it, as it were. More fun info! Had several interesting talks with my surgeon. My brother asked, how'd you end up doing transplants? He said, well, originally I wanted to play basketball and then be a basketball coach. Then he went through a half dozen other career paths that seemed cool at first but got boring or otherwise unacceptable. Well, glad he ended up doing this because he's clearly the best or among the best ever. About his approach to liver failure and cross blood-type transplants: he explained that there had been a series of deaths after transplants that were fairly mysterious, and they had been blamed on the cross blood-type issue. So when he first started (at Children's Hospital in Atlanta) he avoided that. But then one day he had a really sick kid, who needed a liver asap. So he did a cross blood-type transplant, and it worked out pretty well. "Then I did thirty more and THEY worked out pretty well too." So he doesn't really worry much about it now. The key is to get the new liver in as fast as possible and not wait around for the patient to deteriorate. Some people say, "wait and see, maybe the liver will get better" but in his experience, the liver doesn't get better after a certain point. And the patient's chances get smaller and smaller as you wait. He said, those guys are theorists, but I'm a surgeon and if the patient dies, I feel like it's something I did. He's done something like 900 transplants in 20 years, 300 of them on kids. Just as interesting as that, it turns out that liver transplants were first done <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_transplant">right here in Denver.</a> One of the older nurses at the hospital told me she'd actually been there back in the 60s when Dr. Starzl was working on this, and she thought at the time that it was unethical because "those patients looked terrible". But Starzl said, we gotta start somewhere. And low and behold, 47 odd years later, I got a transplant and it fucking kicked ass.[/quote]