Stakeholder

Listening to The Nolan Show this week I was torn between a sense of hopelessness and anger at the story about the young man who
requires an urgent liver transplant.

Hearing his father speaking to Stephen Nolan was heartbreaking. Here is a man facing his worst nightmare. Having brought his son into the world this father is not going to give up on him easily. And who could blame him? Would not any parent do the same?

Ask a parent who has lost a child and you will find a wound that never fully heals and to a parent it does not matter if that child is four or 44.

We are regularly treated to media stories about parents moving heaven and earth, selling their homes and moving countries to get the best possible medical care for their children. It’s what parents do. Where there is a will, parents will find a way.

Parents motivated by unconditional love will attempt to move mountains to protect their children, even if it is for only one day more together. That is why parents up and down the country felt for the parents of this young man. To them and others, they thought there but for the grace of God, go I.

Apparently this young man suffered from acute liver failure due to binge drinking.

Reading the comments on The Nolan Show website, some think his condition is self afflicted and deserving of little sympathy. I can never understand such absolutists.

They live in a colourless world full of certainty where everything is neatly presented in just black and white. If these people cannot find compassion for a young man who in the certainty of his own youthfulness could be expected to make mistakes, even fatal ones, they cannot know love.

The dilemma faced by the medical profession is commonplace in hospitals across the world but listening to a debate about the rights and wrongs of a live case played out in public must be devastating. For better or worse, it falls to doctors to make choices about who gets what and when. The demand for liver transplants far outstrips supply.

Britain and Ireland have some of the lowest rates of organ donation in the western world, so people end up on lists and fairly or unfairly sometimes they die while on those lists.

If we are serious about saving lives, then it’s better to be an organ donor than a disgruntled mother from Dungannon or an angry taxi driver from Antrim on a radio phone-in programme.

The qualifications for receiving an organ transplant, if damage is caused by alcohol or drug damage, is six months clean from such abuse. As the acute nature of this young man’s condition apparently only manifested itself last week, he cannot meet the criteria for consideration. So the debate on The Nolan Show initially centred on having the criteria relaxed so  this young man could be considered.

His father not unreasonably lobbied every politician in sight, putting enormous pressure on health minister Michael McGimpsey whose executive colleagues were only too happy to pass the buck to Mr McGimpsey for a judgment call that even Solomon would not have relished.

However, as the debate progressed, despite his protestations to the contrary, Nolan appeared with characteristic zeal to encourage debate not only among the public but among the medical profession as to the merits of this process, which not only affects this young man but the families of the other five Northern Ireland people, who are barely living but patiently waiting for liver transplants.

They, however, were not The Nolan Show’s cause celebre, we know little about them.

But one suspects that they are equally loved by their families. Receiving a transplant is a risky process, it may not work. So a hope raised can be equally extinguished within months.

However well intentioned a subject for the producers and Nolan, one could not help but think that the debate on the show was moving towards uncharted territory, crossing the thin line between encouraging social activism and ghoulish entertainment.

The blurring of that line could lead to evastating consequences. What next, organ transplant by popular vote? A reality TV show, whereby patients compete for treatment on the basis of their stories with Dr Hilary as host?

Daily, doctors will face hundreds of patients with life-threatening conditions, each with equally compelling stories and loving families but there are no Baftas for the reality of having to make life-saving choices.