Coma

“How much longer?” the anesthesiologist asked over the ether screen, putting his pen down.

Stark’s eyes were wildly dancing from the clock to the door, then back to the operative field. He had taken over tying the skin sutures from the bumbling resident.

“Five minutes, tops,” said Stark as he ran a knot down with his deft fingers. Stark too was nervous. That was obvious to the resident, who thought he himself must be the cause. But Stark was nervous because he knew that something was not right.

The oxygen non-return valve should not have failed. That meant that the oxygen pressure had fallen to zero in the main line. Of the operating team, only Stark knew that the patient’s cardiac irregularities meant that she had received carbon monoxide with the mainline oxygen. But when that oxygen source failed, he couldn’t be sure whether Susan had received enough of the deadly gas for his purposes.

And then there had been the muffled shouts which had caused the circulating nurses to check the corridor. But Stark knew that the noises came from above, from the ceiling space.

But that wasn’t all. As Stark was making the next to last skin suture, his eyes caught a surge of movement in the corridor through the window of the OR door. The corridor seemed to be filled with people, and at 12:35 A.M. that was inappropriate, to say the least.

Stark placed the last skin suture and dropped the needle bolder onto the instrument tray. As he picked up the ends to tie the knot, the OR

door swung open, and Stark saw at least four people advance into the room. Mark Bellows was among them.

The sudden visitors wore surgical gowns, and Stark’s pulse began to race as he realized that most of them had thrown their gowns over blue uniforms. A deadly silence hung in the OR. But as Stark straightened up from the operating table, he knew now that something was wrong.

Something was very Wrong.

THE END.

Author’s Note

This novel was conceived as an entertainment, but it is not science fiction. Its implications are scary because they are possible, perhaps even probable. Consider a classified advertisement that appeared in the San Gabriel (Calif.) Tribune, May 9, 1968, col. 4: NEED A TRANSPLANT?

Man will sell any portion of body for financial remuneration to person needing an operation. Write box 1211-630, Covina.

The advertiser did not specify what organ or organs, or even whose body they were to come from.

And there have been other advertisements, many others, in various newspapers across the country. Even specific offers of the hearts from living people!

As gruesome as these ads sound, they should come as no great surprise.

There are plenty of precedents for the market economy in medicine.

Blood—which may be considered as an organ—is routinely bought and sold. There is a commerce in semen, which, while not an organ, is the product of an organ.

Other organs have been bought and sold. In the 1930’s, a rich Italian man bought a testis from a young Neapolitan and had it transplanted into himself. (He not only wanted the product but he wanted to be a distributor as well.) In the last few years there have been episodes where families have declined to give their own kidneys to dying relatives and have sought out and paid volunteer donors. Such cases have not been common, but they have occurred.

The larger problem, the danger, arises from the simple matter of scarcity. There are thousands of people waiting for kidneys and corneas today. The reason that these two organs are particularly coveted is because they have most frequency been transplanted—successfully.

Thanks to dialysis machines, potential kidney recipients (some of them ... others are left to die because of shortages of dialysis machines, personnel, and funds) can be kept alive, but their lives are far from normal. In many situations they border on the desperate, so much so that kidney dialysis centers have reported a so-called “Holiday Syndrome.” What that means is that when a holiday weekend approaches, the patients’ spirits rise as they anticipate the rush of auto accidents and the victims who may supply the eagerly awaited and desperately needed organs.

The tragedy in this situation is that the solution to the problem is already within our grasp. Medical technology has advanced to the point where approximately seven percent of all cadaver kidneys are suitable for transplant (and the figure is much higher for corneas), if they are taken from the donor body within an hour of death. But instead of being put to this noble use, these organs are regularly delivered to the worms or to the fires of the crematorium because of legal mumbo jumbo whose origins lie in the dark ages of English law. For back in those times corpses came under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical rather than civil law. It seems inconceivable that such a legacy should limit our lives today. But it does.