Tag: transplant

Categories
pandemic

More Covid News Stories

As much as I want to ignore hysterical news coverage, I still cannot tune out covid stories. Even though I try not to open the news app on my phone, I find myself jolting into full consciousness after scrolling for who-knows-how-long and wincing as I realize that I’m reading yet another covid story. By that point, I’m halfway to bookmarking it to share with y’all later or reading it aloud to my sister. Because you know the old adage– misery loves company. With that depressing introduction, here’s three stories that caught my interest so far this week…

one: covid transplant

Organ transplant patient dies when they receive (unknown) covid lungs. You have to keep doing transplants during a pandemic because people are still dying waiting for them… and when an organ becomes available, you have a VERY limited amount of time to utilize it. But there is really such a short window of time in which the whole process occurs, sometimes 1 day. A person can test negative for covid but actually be positive in that time. So sad that someone got new lungs, only to get covid also.

two: doc photog

Dr. Scott Kobner is the chief emergency room resident at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center and an amateur photographer. He photo-documented covid as it occurred at his hospital in stunning black and white.

three: bird flu

Even the headline on this piece made my blood run cold and my heart shutter a little as I remember all the pregnant women in the ICU in 2009, the year we fought H1N1: “Russia tells WHO it has detected first case of avian flu strain in humans.” My first thought: pandemic on top of pandemic??? NOOOO!!!!!! But it turns out the headline is a little misleading because although 2 people have indeed been diagnosed with H1N8, a new bird flu to transmit to humans, it was from direct bird contact and has not passed from human to human. But, you know, we might want to insert the word “yet” in the previous sentence so it reads “it has not YET passed from human to human.” Don’t all the viruses seem to go that way eventually?

Categories
blacklivesmatter

Really, just now an east coast hospital proves that black people are discriminated against during the kidney transplant process?

I could just about die this very serious news article was so funny to me. I say with all sarcasm intended, if you can’t hear my tone. The general theory of article is there is a lab test that measures kidney failure correctly in white people (surprise) and is inaccurate for black people. It’s been causing black people to be overlooked for kidney transplants for years! So once the scientists did a little recalculating, we have a formula for both sets of people that reflects their kidney failure more accurately!

Wired: “How an Algorithm Blocked Kidney Transplants to Black Patients”

You wouldn’t think this would be so hard to figure out, except medicine has been a white man’s game since its inception. Most research on procedures and drugs, even today, is still done primarily on–you guessed it! Men!!! Of the white variety. But other things struck me funny (?) about the article as well. Let me run down my giggle list:

  1. Wired Magazine a quite prestigious news organization for science and technology (and I must admit, must I?, a former employer of mine) is covering this topic. This topic is not new or groundbreaking or pushing forward the field of medicine in any way. I find this interesting.
  2. I literally had no idea that other hospitals (geographic areas? States etc?) did not use the recalculated eGFR to determine the severity of black people’s kidney failure. We’ve been doing this at my facility for at least 10 years… I remember when it changed, but time flies when you’re wiping ass. Our chemistry reports show both values automatically, actually.
  3. Last but not least, I want to mention that getting selected and then listed for an organ transplant is a crazy process, one mainly shrouded in mystery to the average American. But it is not a joke. There are not nearly enough organs for people that need them. Surgeons that do these procedures are in competition to get the organs for their patients, to perform the surgeries at their hospitals. They often have quotas they have to hit to stay certified as a transplant center (both for the doctors and the nurses), and for some organs like livers and hearts and lungs, the patients may be in the hospital for months waiting… not even at home. Also, as this article notes, the process can be burdened by institutional racism. Sometimes it even looks a lot like real racism– for instance the young black men in our advanced heart failure service do not usually succeed in getting a heart transplant. They certainly qualify and are listed. But we had one (and he is a sort of amalgam if patients that serves as an example), we’ll call him Kevin. Kevin was so tall, like 6’4″ and he was like a brick house, weighed maybe almost 300 when he came in the hospital and last 50-60 pounds in the 3 months he stayed in. We waited and waited but we couldn’t find him a heart. There were (per the doctor) about 3 other guys if his size on the transplant list ahead of him. I used to joke that we would need a bus of NFL players to get into an accident for these guys. Typing that now, I realize that is some really dark stuff, but Kevin and I needed a laugh of any kind in those long days where he couldn’t sleep and was stuck in his 12 by 20 hospital room for weeks on end. In the end, he got an LVAD (left ventricular assist device) because it had enough power to help his heart–and it meant he could finally go home and live some life.

Some day I’ll write more about transplants, even though I worry that I’ll be breaking some secret code to just keep quiet.