Palace in the Cornfield

At one point in 2012, I was working with the ABC program Nightline and reporter Bill Weir for a feature story about organ transplantation – the need for more donors and the role regenerative medicine might play in the future of organ failure.

We had a series of shoots at the hospital with a freelance crew and his producer. What they really wanted to capture was a live transplant as it happened. We had the perfect patient to chronicle for transplant – an affable woman in her mid-20s diagnosed with restrictive cardiomyopathy, which led to congestive heart failure. She needed a new heart and liver for a rare double transplant. She was waiting in limbo at Mayo Clinic for the right candidate to give their life to save hers.

About 4:30 p.m. one afternoon we got a call from our colleagues at the organ procurement organization that supplied Mayo Clinic. They had a donor, it seemed, who would be a suitable candidate for this woman. Donor organs would be removed and enroute to Mayo in a few hours.

We called the producers at Nightline. They frantically scrambled to locate a freelance shooting crew from the Twin Cities to drive to Rochester ASAP. They found a reliable team and told them to hit the road.

Any time there is a camera at mostly any hospital in the United States, they need to an escort when they are on campus. The onus is on the hospital to make sure that cameras are cautious about what they film due to patient privacy laws that protect anonymity (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, more commonly known as HIPAA). Only people who sign consent forms are allowed to be on camera.

Another reason for the handholding is it helps to have a familiar face and hospital employee readily available with a camera crew to answer any questions that employees, patients and providers have when they see a camera pointed in their direction.

Since I was the single guy, I lived by the hospital, supported the transplantation team for communications and didn’t have to be home for anything other than television and a Bacardi diet, I was summoned to help escort the film crew.

We started at the Rochester airport. They arrived in time to secure footage of the plane landing with the organs. They captured video of the red cooler holding the liver and heart in transit to another vehicle on its way to the patient. We departed to the hospital and scrubbed up to disinfect and sterilize before going in the operating room to capture the surgery.

The transplant recipient went under the knife around 10 p.m. The procedure lasted nearly 8 hours. I remember lots of flashes from that night:
o Blood, pints of it. On every surface in the operating room.
o Dozens of hazardous material bags of discarded blue surgical paper full of blood.
o Seeing the surgeon cut down the middle of her upper body cavity and pry it open like a package.
o Nurses running around the room in a panic – about 25 of them – when something obviously went wrong.
o Being kicked out of surgery into a nearby hallway with the camera crew.
o Frantically conversing about what to do if the patient died on the operating table mid surgery with the shooters and Nightline producers on speaker phone.
o Relief about an hour later when one of the surgeons exited the room and took a deep breath. He sat down in silence for a few moments. During the surgery, he said, he had to stick his pinky in one of her arteries to stop her from bleeding out while they attached her new heart.
o Being consumed in utter and complete exhaustion after she was moved to the intensive care unit.
o Wrapping around 8 a.m. – jittery from riding an emotional roller coaster.

But the thing I’ll remember the most about the night is this: declining an offer for breakfast with the film crew to recap the nerve-wracking night, so I could go home and have a drink. At 10 a.m.

I needed it to calm my nerves and halt my body from withdrawing. I had two stiff drinks and faded to black.