Day One on the List

Wow—what a night! If you have not already read the entries from yesterday, you should probably read those first.

Hopkins confirmed around dinner time yesterday that Sandy had been listed with UNOS. They would contact us tomorrow (which is now today—Friday) to confirm her MELD score, where she sits on the list, and to communicate instructions. These are the type of instructions that tell you to stay close to home, what to do when they call, what to expect in the process, and so on.

A little after 11pm last night, the phone rang. It was Julie, the transplant coordinator at Hopkins saying, “Dr. Maley asked me to call you and tell you that we have a liver for Sandy.” She went on to describe what would happen over the next several hours. Dr. Maley would drive to Pennsylvania to inspect the patient and the liver and decide whether to accept it. Julie told us that she would call us back as soon as she heard back from him. That could be as early as 2am or even a few hours beyond that. “These ER situations can sometimes drag on,” she said matter-of-factly.

So there we were. Two minutes earlier we had both been nearly asleep…and now we weren’t. Who has ever heard of someone being on a waiting list for only five hours? We never considered that this could happen so quickly. You know intellectually that it can happen, but you don't let yourself think that it will happen.

We could only sit and wait for the next call. Sandy was able to use this time to pack a small bag and we both thought a bit about the other things you need to deal with. We watched Conan O'Brien for the first time in a long time. For those of you thinking, “this sounds like when you’re ready to deliver a baby,” it is exactly like that. Your mind races, you wonder about who to call in the middle of the night to stay with the kids, who will make their lunches for school, have we paid all the bills that are due in the next few weeks, and so on. Ironically, Sandy and I talked about these issues at around 8:30 last night and resolved to make a plan over the weekend to address all of these things. Funny how things work out.

Neither of us got much sleep until the phone rang again at 3:50am. It was Julie again, but this time she said that Dr. Maley had inspected and rejected the candidate liver.

Now we could go back to sleep. Fire drill over.

This exercise offered some interesting information. First, it confirmed that Sandy is the highest recipient on the list in the region with AB blood type. Next, the proffered liver was from an outside region (Pennsylvania is in a separate region), which would suggest that they have no AB recipients on their list at this time. AB is the rarest blood type and those with this type are universal recipients. That is, they can accept livers from any other blood type, making a match much more likely. That should all bode well for Sandy as new candidates come up.

Stay tuned. Same Bat-channel.