Snowflakes, livers and odds.

*grumble* I didn’t sleep well last night. No, let me amend that statement. I didn’t sleep last night. That’s a far more accurate way of phrasing it.

The results show today. I’m inattentive, unproductive, and ornery. I’m also not hungry. Looks like a can of Ensure for dinner tonight. Joy. It gave me time to play at the United Network for Organ Sharing’s website last night, though.

A few facts I uncovered while delving into UNOS’s data:

Waiting list candidates 80,726 as of today 3:56pm

Transplants January – August 2002 12,092 as of 12/13/2002

Donors January – August 2002 6,206 as of 12/13/2002

Number on Liver Transplant Waiting list for my hospital in 2002: 414

Broken Down by MELD Score:

Inactive: 41

<10: 242

11 – 18: 114 (I’m currently an 18)

19 – 24: 11

>25: 6

So, there could be as few as 17 people ahead of me in line, or as many as 130. Furthermore, in 2002 there were 84 transplants from deceased donors and 7 from living donors at my hospital.

So will this be my year? It’s anybody’s guess. People are newly diagnosed and can move onto the list at any point at any time. Others who are waiting will die before they receive their organ; that was the case with seventeen on my center’s waiting list last year. Another six became too sick to be able to withstand the grueling operation. They will eventually die of their ailment, but they won’t be on the waiting list when it happens.

Being apprised of these facts is not the same as appraising them. And the bottom line is thatl this is all just statistics. It’s tricks with numbers that mathematicians do to make data manageable. That number “414” is an abstract when stuck into a chart in easy-to-read form. But it represents 414 people who are not statistics. Each one has his own illness, his own story, his own reason to go on living. Each one lives independent of the odds. Each one lives their life in defiance of the odds.

It’s the difference between a shovel full of snow and snowflakes. I realized that as I walked in tonight and noticed that the flurries surrounding me were made up of individual six-pointed crystals. No fluffy poofy blobs from the sky. No little ice balls or needles. Just real, beautiful, single snowflakes. The banister to my stairway was cold enough to hold their forms suspended, until little gusts of wind blew them to whatever fate lay in store and the next set of snowflakes landed to be admired. Looking across the parking lot, all I saw was piles of snow. Some was ground under car tires and molded into two-dimensional tire tread. Some had been plowed to the side and sat in relatively pristine glistening piles. More hung from tree limbs and created thin, cold blankets on empty garden beds. Hundreds, thousands, millions of snowflakes were out there. Each one still a single snowflake though, with its own special shimmering uniqueness. Each one is out there, beating the snowflake odds of ever forming and falling to earth intact. Each one is going to melt eventually, but some will find that special sheltered alcove that lets them linger just a little bit longer. Just like the people lumped into that “414”. Just like me.

So I ask again, will this be my year? Of course it will be. I define myself by more than my liver, and I defy the Gods of Statistics. Statistics tells you what happens to snow banks, not snowflakes.

Now if I could only get some sleep ….