May 03, 2001 07:02 PM
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If you are healthy, have a blood type that is rare, have your organs in good health. Then this book will make you think twice before you have a physical in the hospital.
it involves a young doctor who finds out about an organ-heist cartel, which basically involves surgeons and anesthesiologists working together to cull the best organ donors from a pool of people coming in for routine procedures such as D&C's, cataract operations, laser operations to the cervix, and the like, after which they make sure that these organ donors end up comatose and in danger of death. (I will leave the method of coma induction to the reader's imagination; suffice it to say that someone in the medical engineering section of the hospital was in on the secret somehow.) The coma patients are then sent to a special intensive-care unit that specializes in coma patients. One room of this center is set up for visiting, to look like the layman's conception of what an ICU room looks like from his or her experience visiting people in a regular hospital.
In the back, however, the investigator is horrified to see these patients in what amounts to suspended animation. This is where they are kept until a call for a kidney or liver of a certain type comes in, at which time the right recipient is prepped and the organ of choice is removed surgically. This is all done without the knowledge or consent of the next-of-kin.
It all works out in the end, however. This book is extremely suspenseful reading .Trust your doctor? Terrific. Read the book and ask yourself the same question
