I’m Bev Alt and I work in Lifebanc’s procurement department. My responsibility is to oversee the medical management of our organ donors in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) in many hospitals throughout northeast Ohio.
It takes collaboration between Lifebanc, hospital and transplant staff to manage our organ donor cases. Lifebanc’s staff is in the ICU from the time our Family Support Liaison obtains authorization or consent from the donor family, until all the organs are transported to those waiting transplants. On average, this process takes 36 hours.
There are times we have eligible donors who for one reason or another do not become actual organ donors. We work to keep our donor’s metabolic numbers stable so that the organs will be viable for transplant. That may seem simple, but in many cases it is not. Many times eligible donors are unstable due to the nature of their injury and the brain death process. Our procurement/recovery department is a diverse group of nurses, respiratory therapists and paramedics, which is led by our Chief Clinical Officer and medical director. We all have critical care backgrounds and are able to share our strengths and grow from one another’s experience. Our diversity, I believe, is what makes us the strong group we are. Our job is ever changing and growing. It would be an uncommon occasion to not learn something new every day. I started working for Lifebanc five years ago, and the things I do now are so different from what I was doing then. This is a relatively new field, and the advances are amazing.
Several years ago when I was working in an ICU at a Cleveland hospital, a Lifebanc representative was educating the staff about donation and the organization. I faxed my resume in the next day and here I am. I loved working in the ICU, I got to do all the “fun nurse stuff” and still take hands-on-care of my patients. My family knew how much nursing meant to me. It’s all I can ever remember wanting to do, that and being a Mom. I did the Mom thing first and when my youngest was four I went back to school. When I took this job with Lifebanc it was hard for my family, who knew me best, to understand how I could go from working with my ICU patient, who would get better and go home, to working with “patients” that wouldn’t. But our organ donors are still someone’s, Mom, Dad, brother, sister or child. I often imagine the level of care I would want if this were my loved one. It’s true these patients aren’t going home, but someone else could. In fact eight other lives could be saved through organ donation and transplantation alone. So now, I not only take care of our organ donors but also the recipients.
I could tell you all the clinical things I do, but that’s not the real reason I love my job. Here is a story that sums up why I love what I do. I went out to start a case at one of our local hospitals. There was a gentleman; he had registered his decision to become an organ, eye and tissue donor, who’d been in a tragic accident. His family wanted to honor his decision to become a donor. A typical case is very busy with lots of testing and the bedside nurse is usually running non-stop. When I arrived at the hospital, the family was just leaving. I started writing medical management orders and handing the bedside nurse the many tubes we needed filled for testing. As we talked, it seemed as if something was bothering the nurse. I thought she must just be extremely busy. When I asked if I could help, she told me that the only way she got this patient’s wife to go home and rest was to promise to bathe her husband. The nurse knew we needed to get this testing done, but she’d also made a promise to the wife to bathe her husband. So, that’s what we did. We put everything else on hold and we took care of him. As a nurse, we knew our priorities, our patient was stable and a promise had been made. This is just one of many stories that I could share in which a case took a little longer because a Mom wanted to hold her child one more time or a husband needed to be alone with his wife for just a few more minutes to say goodbye. I get to work for an organization that is both passionate and caring. So I still get to do all the fun “nurse stuff” and I get to give hands-on care to my “patients” so that others may live.
