As my pal Mazen says from time to time,

"Deez? Eez bool-cheat."

Yes, it is. It is indeed bool-cheat.

I fear my gallbladder is on the fritz. (Slightly used, low-mileage gallbladder: anybody got one?) After my twice-monthly cheezburger last week (nom nom nom nom), I was down for two days with abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, a low-grade temp, and other things you really don't want to hear about. Since then, my right upper abdominal quadrant has hurt like a son of a bitch, and I really don't have a lot of appetite.

Friends came over last night for homemade bread, beef stew, and apple crisp, and I didn't want any of it. That, my friends, is how bad it is. That is how much bool-cheat we're dealin' with: When Mama don't want to eat, you might as well kiss the world goodbye.

I see the Muppet Doctor tomorrow for what I hope will be a diagnosis. I sincerely hope it's not a toomah.

So I wasn't in the best of moods when I showed up to work today.

I was in even less of a good mood once I saw my patient.

Eight drips.

Eight. Freaking. Fluids. Going. At Once.

Lasix. Insulin. Levothyroxine. Bicarb. Two pressors. Fluids. And a rider for the mag and potassium and everything else we had to hang.

My bad mood turned worse when I found out why this poor guy had eight drips on him:

One of those "devastating" bleeds.

Young kid, mid-thirties (anybody younger than me is a "young kid"), two little children, loving wife, close enough to his coworkers that they consider him part of the family.

And a devastating bleed with no history of anything: no hypertension, no diabetes, no nothing. He was brain dead when I showed up, and did not improve.

It was a bad day for me and for him.

It's gonna be a good day, though, for a whole bunch of people, and here's why:

His kidneys are going to two different folks who have both been on the transplant list for a couple of years.

His liver is going to a guy who was sent home on hospice last week.

His heart is going to somebody.

His lungs? Going to somebody.

His pancreas, amazingly, is going to somebody else. (Pancreas transplants usually work best when the donor is very young; this guy was in great shape, so we can use his pancreas.)

Bones? Skin? Tendons? Intestines? Nerves? (They transplant *nerves* now? The transplant coordinator assured me they can.) Corneas? Check, check, check, check, check, and ditto.

There are going to be at least ten people, by my calculations, who have this one person to thank for their lives, their vision, their ability to produce insulin, and their ease in walking. Never mind the at-least-five people who will have skin grafts thanks to him. Never mind the folks who will get bits of intestine that will allow them to have something close to a normal life again.

It was horrible, and it was wonderful. In the middle of drawing the nearly forty tubes of blood that needed to be drawn prior to "harvesting" (or "retrieval", as some people call it, but I prefer "harvesting"), I realized that this one man, though he was lost to his family and his friends, would *literally make living possible* for any number of people.

Young people make fantastic donors and really, really crappy patients. Inertia will only take you so far, and sometimes the dead are harder to keep breathing than the living-yet-very-sick. This guy, despite all the odds, managed to get off his pressor drips and his insulin and everything else well within the time limits specified by the transplant experts; he ended the day on nothing but plain normal saline. That means that he'll be scooped out (to put it bluntly) like a melon, with wooden dowels replacing his bones and clothing covering his skin donor sites.....

....but there will be a handful of people who have him to thank for their lives. Their LIVES.

Most of us, me included, can't guarantee we'll touch that many people in a lasting way in the course of a career that stretches twenty years. He did it in one day.

It was sad. It was happy. I watched the transplant nurse's computer, and saw how all the acknowledgements came in from various transplant centers. I imagined how it would feel to have that beeper that's stayed silent for so long finally go off, and to know that your second chance came at the expense of somebody else's.

When, not if, but when my aneurysm blows and I infarct at least one half of my brain, do this:

Take what you can. I don't care how tricky or political or corrupt the system is, the ends justify the means in this case. Use my kidneys, my heart, my cruddy lungs, whatever.

Donate the rest to a medical school. They can have fun studying my muscles and my skull, if nothing else.

Compost the rest out in the back yard, and plant a garden over it. In the high summer, when the produce is ready to pick, go out and grab a tomato off the vine, polish it on your shirt, and bite into it. My epitaph will read, "That Jo! She was one heck of a tomato!"