The heart-wrench and triumphs of organ and tissue donation: lung recipients who run marathons, dying patients cured by strangers, a man who can see after being blind for 48 years.
Excerpt
The Boy Who Saved Thousands of Lives
The Author’s Own Story
On the night my seven-year-old son, Nicholas, was shot we were playing a game in the car as we drove on vacation along the main road in Southern Italy between Naples and Sicily. As usual, he was hard to beat. I went over again the answers he’d given: the man I was looking for was a hero, a real person and we’d been to places where he’d lived. He wasn’t American or British, not French or Roman or Greek. In the end I had no choice. “I give up,” I told him.
“Bonnie Prince Charlie,” said Nicholas happily. “You said he wasn’t British,” I protested. “No, I said he wasn’t English,” he answered. It was true. That’s what he had said. This last win was typical of the way he did everything: he chose well, never cheated and had a lot of fun doing it. His teacher said he was the most giving child she had ever known and she always knew he was her teacher.
Soon he was asleep, propped up on the back seat next to his sister, four-year-old Eleanor, and I, driving beside my wife, Maggie, probably thought as I often did: “How can anyone be this happy?”
An hour or so later I had the first faint tremor of anxiety. A car, headlights on but dark inside, came up close behind us and stayed there for a few moments, unusual in Italy where cars generally pull out a long way behind and streak by. “There’s something wrong,” I said, half to myself. Maggie, who was dozing, sat up quickly.
Just then the other car moved out and began to overtake. I relaxed, nothing wrong after all. But, instead of overtaking, the car ran alongside us for a few seconds and through the night we heard loud, angry, savage cries, the words indistinguishable but clearly telling us to stop.
It seemed to me that if we did stop we would be completely at their mercy. So instead I accelerated. They accelerated too. I floored the car, they floored theirs and the two cars raced alongside each other at top speed through the night.
A few seconds later, any illusions that this was just a reckless prank vanished, as a bullet shattered the window where the two children were sleeping. Maggie turned around to make sure they were safe. Both appeared to be sleeping peacefully. It seemed like a blessing at the time. A second or two later, the driver’s window was blown in and how that bullet missed both Maggie and me in the front seat we’ll never know.
But by now, we were beginning to pull away and, from seeing them alongside, I watched them through the side mirror and then, falling further behind, the driving mirror, finally disappearing into the night. It turned out later that they had mistaken our rental car, with its Rome license plates, for another that was delivering jewelry to stores. We raced on, looking for somewhere with lights and people.
As it happened, there had been an accident on the road and an ambulance and police were already there. I stopped the car and got out. The interior light came on but Nicholas didn’t move. I looked closer and saw his tongue was sticking out slightly and there was a trace of vomit on his chin. For the first time we realized something terrible had happened.
He was whisked away in the ambulance and, after answering questions from the police, we followed, with that feeling of gnawing emptiness that for months afterward never went away. In time we reached a small hospital, in the car park of which was an ambulance and, standing around it in total silence, what looked like the entire medical staff.
I hoped against hope that it was there for a different purpose but, when I looked inside, I saw Nicholas’ pale face, peaceful and freshly washed, looking as though he had just been put to bed. The chief surgeon explained that he was too badly injured for them to operate and he would be taken to a larger hospital in Messina, Sicily, to see what they could do. I have never known such bleakness.
Two hours later, at the new hospital, the signs were ominous from the beginning. We were directed to a department called ‘rianimazione’ — literally reanimation, and shown into a room, where again it seemed as though the whole medical staff was gathered and all again totally silent. After a moment, the chief neurologist said quietly, “The situation is very dramatic” and all the small shoots of hope that had grown in those two hours withered away. The bullet had lodged at the base of the brain, they told us, the seat of all brain functions, and he was too weak for them to operate. The only hope was that he might regain enough strength for them to try something later.
But, instead, his life quietly drained away. In death, as in life, he was no trouble to anyone. After two days all brain activity ceased and all the brightly-colored dreams of a young idealist, who had planned to do such deeds as the world has never known, died too.
For a while, Maggie and I sat silently, holding hands, and trying to absorb the finality of it all. I remember thinking, “How am I going to get through the rest of my life without him?” Never to run my fingers through his hair again, never to hear him say, “Goodnight, Daddy.”
Then one of us, we don’t remember who but, knowing her, I feel sure it was Maggie, said, “Now that he’s gone, shouldn’t we donate the organs?” The other one said “yes,” and that’s all there was to it. It was just so obvious: he didn’t need that body anymore.
As it turned out, there were seven recipients, four of them teenagers and two others the parents of young children. One, Andrea, was a boy of 15 who had had five operations on his heart, all of which had failed. By now, he could scarcely walk to the door of his apartment. Domenica had never seen her baby’s face clearly. Francesco, a keen sportsman, could no longer see his children play games. Two of the teenagers, Anna-Maria and Tino, had been hooked up to dialysis machines for years to ward off kidney failure, four hours a day, three days a week, losing their entire childhood, never being able to go far from home and already aware that they might never become adults. Silvia was a diabetic who was going blind, had been in multiple comas and couldn’t walk without help. Finally, there was a vivacious 19-year old girl, Maria Pia, who on that very day was in her final coma from liver failure. Her brother had died of a liver disease, her mother was dead, too, and the family w
as preparing to take another devastating blow.
In that hushed hospital room in Messina these people were just statistics to us. But now, having met them and seen the agony they had gone through and knowing what would have happened to them, I don’t think that Maggie and I could ever have looked back without a deep sense of shame, if we had shrugged off their problems as none of our concern,
Our decision, however, electrified Italy. The prime minister and president asked to see us, we were flown home in the president’s own aircraft and, in the dead of night at a deserted airfield near San Francisco, the honor guard who brought Nicholas’ body home, with no one there to watch, insisted on performing the full ceremonial due to a national hero. Now streets, schools and squares from the Alps to Sicily, and the largest hospital in Italy, are named for him.
With the worldwide media coverage that followed, people who had scarcely given the subject a thought became aware that thousands of unnecessary deaths result every year from the shortage of donated organs. On his grave one day I found an anonymous note, typical in its intensity. It said simply, “Dear little Nicholas, we love you. God bless you to eternity, sweet child.”
In Italy alone, organ donation rates have tripled since he was killed, so that thousands of people are alive who otherwise would have died. Obviously, an increase of that magnitude, not even remotely approached in other developed countries, must have a variety of causes, but it seems clear that Nicholas’ story was a catalyst that changed the attitude of an entire nation.
Since then, all seven of his recipients have had new lives. To think of just one of them: Maria Pia, who bounced back to health, married in the full bloom of womanhood and has had two children, a boy and a girl – two whole lives that would never have been. As far as anyone knows, the livers of all three, in a family with a history of liver disease, are working perfectly. And, yes, she named her boy Nicholas.
Organ donation goes beyond even life-saving surgery, however, to another level of understanding. A young woman from Rome wrote this to us: “Since when your son has died, my heart is beating faster. I think that people, common persons, can change the world. When you go to the little graveyard place please say this to him, ‘They closed your eyes, but you opened mine.’ ”
Copyright 2008 Reg Green. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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