Palace in the Cornfield

At one point in 2012, I was working with the ABC program Nightline and reporter/anchor Bill Weir on a feature story about organ transplantation. It centered around the need for more donors and the role regenerative medicine might play in the future for organ transplant recipients.

We had a series of shoots and interviews scheduled across several days at the hospital with a freelance crew, Weir, and his producer. They were intent on capturing a live transplant as it happened. We had the perfect patient to chronicle for transplant, an affable woman in her mid-twenties 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.

Weir and crew did not capture her transplant while visiting, so they put us in touch with a freelance filming crew who could chronicle the action as soon as we got word that acceptable donor organs were enroute for placement. About 4:30 PM one afternoon a few weeks later, we got a call from colleagues at an organ procurement organization that supplied Mayo Clinic donor organs. They had identified a recently deceased candidate whose organs were suitable for this woman. A plane would be landing at the Rochester airport with the donation soon.

We called the producers at Nightline and the freelance film crew after we got the news. The shooters hastily departed from the Twin Cities down Highway 52 toward Rochester.

Any time there is a camera at most any healthcare facility or hospital in the United States, they need an escort when they are on campus. The onus is on the hospital to make sure that cameramen are cautious about what they film due to patient privacy laws that protect anonymity (it’s part of a federal law called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, more commonly known as HIPAA). Only people who sign consent forms for filming are allowed to be on camera.

Another reason for handholding film crews is that it helps to have a familiar face and hospital employee readily available 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 that evening—other than television and a Bacardi diet—I was called upon to escort the film crew as they captured the transplantation.

We started filming at Rochester airport. The crew 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 into the operating room to capture the complicated surgery.

The transplant recipient went under the knife for transplant around 10 PM. The procedure lasted approximately eight hours. My memory is in flashes from that night:

• Blood, pints of it. On every surface in the operating room.
• Dozens of hazardous material bags of discarded blue surgical paper full of blood.
• Seeing the surgeon cut down the middle of her upper body cavity and pry it open like a package.
• Nurses running around the room in a panic—about 25 of them—when something obviously went wrong.
• Being kicked out of surgery into a nearby hallway with the camera crew.
• 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.
• 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 moment. During the surgery, he said he had to stick his pinky in one of her arteries to stop the patient from bleeding out while they attached her new heart.
• Becoming overwhelmed with utter and complete exhaustion after providers moved her from surgery to the intensive care unit.
• Wrapping around 8 AM, jittery from the emotional roller coaster and lack of alcohol.

However, the aspect I will remember most about that 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 9:30 AM. I needed it to calm my nerves and halt my body from withdrawal. I had two stiff drinks in the span of an hour and faded to black.