Organ Donor’s Surgery Death Sparks Questions
Before dawn on her 57th birthday, Lorraine Hawks and her husband, Paul, piled into their brother-in-law Tim Wilson’s Lexus in Pelham, New Hampshire, with Lorraine and her sister Susie in the back seat and the men up front. As the two couples drove to the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, Lorraine and Paul teased Tim mercilessly.
“By 5 o’clock today, you’re going to have a Republican liver!” they taunted Tim. “You’re going to love Ann Coulter! You’re going to love Glenn Beck!”
“No way!” protested Tim, a staunch Democrat. He swore that even with a chunk of his Republican brother-in-law’s liver inside him, he’d never be conservative. The foursome joked and laughed during the 45-minute drive to Lahey. At the hospital, the sisters kissed their husbands goodbye, and the men were wheeled into operating rooms, where surgeons would remove 60% of Paul’s liver and give it to Tim, who suffered from advanced liver disease.
As Lorraine sat in the waiting room with Susie that May morning two years ago, she prayed her husband’s liver lobe would cure her brother-in-law. She prayed for her husband, too, but she was less worried about him, since she says the surgeons had reassured them while liver donation wasn’t without risks, it was safe for Paul, a 56-year-old man in good health.
Neither of Lorraine’s prayers came true. Tim died less than a year later, after receiving the transplanted part of Paul’s liver. He was 58. Her husband died that very day on the operating room table.
“We walked into the hospital a married couple, and I left the hospital at the end of the day as they loaded my husband onto the coroner’s truck,” says Lorraine, who has hired a lawyer and plans to file a lawsuit against the hospital.
‘He didn’t hesitate to say yes’
Paul Hawks, an electrician for the Florida Department of Transportation, was one of more than 4,500 people in the United States in the past 25 years who have donated a section of their liver while still alive. Death is rare — besides Paul, three other donors have died since 1999.
The relatives of the other donors — they died in 1999, 2002 and 2010 — have gone public, but this is the first time Lorraine has discussed her husband’s death.
“I had no idea he’d had an abnormal EKG,” says Lorraine Hawks. “If I had known, I never would have let him have the surgery.”
“I want everyone to know what a generous, wonderful man Paul was. When he found out Tim needed a liver, he didn’t hesitate to say yes,” said Lorraine, a school bus aide for children with special needs in Tampa, Florida. “They weren’t blood relatives, but they were a perfect match, and he felt privileged that God was going to let him help Tim regain his health.”
Living organ transplants are a miracle of modern medicine. In all, more than 100,000 people in the U.S. like Paul have donated a kidney, a liver lobe or another body part while still alive to save someone else’s life. Most of the time, the surgeries go well. Not only are donor deaths rare, but major complications of any kind are the exception rather than the rule.
This makes it all the more difficult for Lorraine to understand why her husband was one of the few who didn’t make it.