Yaakov Lavi
Jewish heart in China
Israel needs more organ donors
For the past 15 months, Moti has been an inseparable part of my life. Since July, 2004, he has been a patient in my unit as a first-degree candidate for a heart transplant. But there have been no donors.
Dr. Yaakov Lavi is head of the heart transplant unit at Sheba Medical Center and the head of the Ynet forum for lung and heart transplantsFor every one of the past 460 days Moti has been connected to life support machines that pump medicines to his veins in place of his failing heart and prevent further, life-ending deterioration.
I meet with him every day, but I have to hide my eyes in shame and pain because I am unable to save his life. I am continually stunned by the inner strength of a man who finds the will to go on living, despite the nightmare of such a terrible, ongoing wait for a donor.
This week, Moti told me someone had offered him a chance to travel to China for a life-saving transplant, and asked my opinion. I hesitated, but in the end I advised him to seriously consider the option. Since then, I have not stopped wondering whether I did the right thing.
Prisoner transplants
For several years, China has taken organs for transplant from executed prisoners. My colleagues who specialize in kidney transplants here in Israel tell of a not-insignificant number of patients who have returned to Israel following successful transplant operations in China.
Next week, the first Israeli heart transplant patient is due to return home, a patient of mine who was given a concrete date for his transplant two months ago – the execution date of a prisoner whose blood type matched that of my patient.
Now, I have been involved in heart transplants for many years, but I never thought I would hear a statement like that. I remember well the shudder that gripped me when he reported back to me, dryly, about what he had undergone.
What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to react? On one hand, as his doctor, I am obliged to do everything I can to save his life. Perhaps I should have given him my blessing – after all, a successful transplant would save his life.
On the other hand, as someone opposed with all my soul to the death penalty, how could I give my blessing to a maneuver such as this?
Can't pass judgment
I have nothing against the personal decision of my patient, who successfully received a transplant in China, or against forlorn Moti's decision to try to repeat the procedure.
Both are fighting for their lives, and tried with all their might to save themselves within the Israeli framework, but the framework let them down, and presented them with a real, tangible threat to their lives.
They decided to save their lives no matter what.
Moti told me this week that transplant patients have nothing to do with the execution of Chinese prisoners. They are slated to die anyway. And if so, why should Israeli patients not try to save themselves if possible?
Lack of donors
But my heart is soured when I think about the depths to where we, here in Israel, have sunk. How did Israeli society sink so low, to a situation in which our patients are forced to save their lives by plucking organs from executed prisoners, when we could easily have saved them right here at home, had family members only given their consent to donate organs from the recently deceased?
The Israeli medical establishment is one of the most advanced and developed in the world. In every medical area we hold our heads high at international forums, and we are considered frontrunners and experts.
There is just one area we fail to address, and we have been rightly criticized for it – organ transplants. And not because there is a lack of knowledge or means to carry out this mission. We have an abundance of both means and the knowledge.
Rather, we lack only the most critical part of the equation, the only part of the equation not in the hands of doctors – a willingness on the part of Israeli society to save other people.
A combination of prejudice, a lack of rabbinic support, and especially terrible indifference leads each year to the deaths of many patients in Israel, lives that could have been saved if only for an organ donor.
Just 45 percent of potential donation families in Israel actually agree to donate their organs, as compared to 70-80 percent in other Western countries.
And when this is the face of the society we live in, how can we complain about patients whose lives are flashing before their very eyes, and who look for any solution – including outright immoral ones – to save their lives?
