Kidney disaster can teach us all a lesson
Have you ever made a massive mistake? Take comfort in the story of a nurse in Toledo, Ohio, attending a living-donor kidney transplant on Aug. 12, who took the freshly removed kidney from the ice machine it was being held in and tossed it down the waste disposal.
Picture the crowded operating room, an anesthetized man donating to his sister, and the transplant surgeon looking up and asking “as to the kidney’s whereabouts,” as a subsequent report put it. What does one say? “Oops?” I would wrap my legs in a knot, crouch and hop around the operating room making keening noises, like Basil Fawlty when he’s reached his limit. You might swallow hard and put your hand up. “Funny story,” you might say.
As it turns out, the nurse said, “Oh no, oh no. I’ve flushed it.” But that isn’t the problem. What did the surgeon say to the family waiting outside, or the patient still with one kidney too few, or worst of all, the donor after he woke up? When the nurse got home early and her spouse asked her how the transplant went, what was her response?
The medical team remains “baffled,” as does the nurse. No one recalls seeing her remove the organ, the central point around which the whole fraught bloody procedure revolved, and she and the supervising nurse can’t explain how or why they didn’t perform several standard checks.
As it stands, they’ve set up new procedures, including making the kidney container brightly coloured — so people notice it being carried out of the room — and putting a lid on it. Sure, it sounds basic now.
The nurse was dismissed, along with the supervising nurse of 30 years standing, who — and this is how unions get a bad name — last week filed a grievance to overturn her dismissal.
Mistakes are common. They’re the fibre of the news feed each day, an ear of corn wrapped in green, people loudly declaiming that the mistake was in fact deliberate and completely thought through. The 2003 American invasion of Iraq is the best example, but here’s more: Gallipoli, genetically modified food, the cult of Stalin, your editor saying “Why don’t just we call it The Satanic Verses?”, the Alberta tarsands, Mitt, your first marriage, choosing to eat at the world’s worst restaurant (hint: it’s the Chili’s at Edmonton International Airport).
Speaking of huge mistakes, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat coalition leader who is the most ridiculed man in modern British history, admitted to one of his. He made a TV ad apologizing for having broken his promise to keep university tuition fees down. “We made a pledge. We did not stick to it,” he said, posing like the sad prat he is in front of a big window. “And for that, I am sorry.”
Within hours, someone had semiautotuned his ad (making him sing his words) and it has become the musical hit of 2012. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry,” he sings, as if he’d slept with your sister. It’s a great pop song.
I am playing the YouTube video as I write this, I hear the song in my head when I wake at 3 a.m., a theme song for the abject and misunderstood Cleggs of this world. “Clegging” had already become a slang word in Britain for something not very nice, and the apology isn’t going to fix that. But it was still worth doing.
If only people apologized more often. The awful thing, of course, is that nobody ever does die of embarrassment. There is no option but to sing “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry,” as you skip out of the operating room, 15 people in surgical scrubs staring at you in disbelief. It’s either that or donate a kidney, on the spot, if you have any decency.
Google “Nick Clegg Apology Song YouTube” and sing along if you’ve ever locked yourself out of a hot car with the baby inside it or chucked out a kidney that your boss had big plans for.
These things happen. They will happen to you. They will happen to you again.