A Fiction on Transplant Ethics - Une fiction sur l'éthique des transplantations

I'm a journalist 2.0. I'm not a physician, or a nurse.  Five years ago, I was a marketing assistant in a multinational firm, then a german teacher.  In touch with surgeons through my family and job, I stumbeled upon conflicts regarding transplantation "ethics", however I did not know a damn thing about organ transplantation at this time. Starting a blog to help myself and others understand more about these conflicts I had witnessed, again and again, and maybe due to the fact that I'm neither a lawyer, nor a transplant surgeon (nurse) or a journalist, etc. - testimonies just kept pouring in.  The blog was breeding quickly:  testimonies from parents who donated organs from their "brain dead" child (or did not donate), from nurses working with transplant surgeons, from doctors and surgeons. Standing in the middle of conflicts is an uncomfortable position.  You cannot hang on like this forever.  Wrath of transplant surgeons, witnessing emotions, feeling them - anger, fear, frustration, humiliation, sadness, love ...

Why the heck did all these unknown people chose me for this "pie in the face" job?  Well, there must have been a need for this role-job-thing ...

 

I guess doctors or psychologists ("shrinks") would fit best in the role of mediator in all these transplant ethics issues. But was a mediator ever found, is it possible to find one (several) ? I guess the transplant medicine community in its whole cannot seem to decide on such mediators.  Lots of wild guesses there, I'll grant you that.  Mediators should not be biaised, and they should not work under pressure.  And there should be no conflit of interest.

 

I'm just the odd woman on the street.  Maybe this is just what all these people I do not know are (were) looking for, eager to tell their "hard won experience", whatever this experience might have been.

 

Well, telling the story of this 5-year-mediation-job-thing is definitely something I have to do.  To start with, I want to tell this story to show how different it is (it was) from a pie-in-the-face-job. Yes yes, that's what you think it is, of course.  But lemme tell you something:  it's not.

Transplant surgeons are passionate, patients are ... passionate, and everybody else has to be standing in between.

Thinking back on some encounters, painful true stories, harsh conflits, resentments ... Sometimes it is just better and safer to use fiction to address sensitive issues.

 

Now, what about my own hard won experience?  Quite frankly, the emotional entanglement that occurs through deep conversation must be avoided, but it is easier said than done.  This is also the reason why I need to write about this quite unusual "blogging" experience. 

So stay tuned, a fiction on transplant ethics will soon be produced.  Special thanks to my "mentors"! Please be patient with me, I promise I'll do my best ... 

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