THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 7 - 8, 2020 |A
A Thank-You Letter for Mrs. T’s Two New Lungs
D
ear unknown friends—if I may
call you that:
My beloved Mrs. T (that’s
her nickname) has been in the inten-
sive-care unit of New York-Presbyte-
rian Hospital since December. She
got a call there last Saturday night
from one of the hospital’s transplant
coordinators.
“We think we have a pair of lungs
for you.”
We’d dreamed for years of hear-
ing those words.
Mrs. T was diagnosed in 2005
with pulmonary hypertension, a ter-
minal disease of the lungs and heart
for which there is no cure, only palli-
ative treatments whose effectiveness
decreases over time. The only “cure”
is a double lung transplant—and
both lungs must come from the same
person.
We entered New York-Presbyte-
rian’s lung-transplant program a
decade ago. (I say “we” because
you must have a full-time care-
giver, a spouse or partner or com-
mitted friend, to be accepted into
the program.) We’ve been waiting
ever since for her to receive a life-
saving transplant. But the demand
for donor organs in the U.S., and
especially in New York, is far
greater than the supply. Every 15
hours, a New Yorker dies while
waiting for a transplant.
Mrs. T was told a year ago that
she was now sick enough to expect
“donor offers.” The two of us refer
to an offer, which can come via cell-
phone at any time of the day or
night, as “the Big Call.” Unfortu-
nately, Mrs. T is short and has A-
positive blood, making it harder to
find sero-compatible lungs that fit
her chest cavity. So even though
she’s been near the top of the trans-
plant waiting list for months, we’d
received only three Big Calls, two in
September and another in February.
All were “dry runs,” meaning that
the lungs proved to be unsuitable for
transplant.
When Mrs. T went into the hospi-
tal in December, we were warned
that she probably wouldn’t come out
alive unless she received a trans-
plant. “I don’t think I’m going tomake it,” she told me last week. “I’m
going to die right here in this bed,
waiting for lungs.” I did what I could
to reassure her, but I knew she might
be right. Days later, I was running
down a hospital corridor behind her
gurney, promising that I’d see her
“on the other side.” And I did: At the
end of a grueling 20-hour operation,
her chest contained two new lungs.That’s where you came in. You
gave her a priceless gift—the gift of
life.
I don’t know who you are, or who
your late child or spouse or partner
was. Under federal law, the identities
of organ donors and recipients are
kept anonymous. After Mrs. T recov-
ers, she can write a letter of thanks
and have it forwarded to you. It’s upto you to decide whether to reply,
and to identify yourself if you like.
Some families do, others don’t. I
once saw a photo of a mother listen-
ing to her dead son’s heart beating
inside the chest of a young woman
whose life was saved when the
mother decided to donate her son’s
organs. I’ll always remember the ec-
static expressions on the faces of
those two women.
Whatever your decision, I want
you to know that I was thinking of
you as I waited to find out whether
Mrs. T would survive her surgery.
For us, our family and our friends,
the news that she had finally found
a donor was cause for rejoicing—but
I also knew that somewhere in the
New York area, another family was
mourning the loss of a loved one.
Such is the tragic truth of double-
lung and heart transplants: Someone
must die to save a stranger’s life.
So I thought about you—and
wept.
Because your child or partner or
spouse unselfishly chose to be an or-
gan donor, and because you chose to
honor his or her wishes, Mrs. T isalive today. If all goes well, she’ll be
able to do things she hasn’t done for
as long as we can recall. She’ll swim
in the ocean again, and walk up a
flight of stairs without gasping for
breath after each step. Her life ex-
pectancy will be measured not in
months or hours, but years.
But we know you weren’t that
lucky, and so our hearts went out to
you in your time of heartbreak.
“Somewhere out there, the family of
Mrs. T’s donor is grieving tonight,” I
wrote last Sunday. “What can I pos-
sibly tell them? We are grateful be-
yond belief for the gift they have
given us. We promise to use it well—
and with love.”
Even if we don’t learn your names
or find out anything about the gen-
erous person whose untimely death
gave Mrs. T a second chance, I make
this vow: Neither of us will ever for-
get you.
May your lives be a blessing to
others, as they were—and are—to
us.Mr. Teachout is the Journal’s
drama critic.By Terry Teachout
To the grieving family
whose loved one’s gift
means my wife’s future
will be measured in years.OPINION
Jim Clyburn Saves the Democrats
They met as students
at South Carolina State
after both were ar-
rested at a civil-rights
demonstration. “I met
her in jail on that day.”
Their marriage lasted
58 years. “I remember
her telling about her
experiences, walking
2½ miles to school ev-
ery morning, 2½ back
home every after-
noon.” She lived on a
small farm. “She
learned how to drive in
a pickup truck. She
came to South Carolina
State in that pickup
truck, with her luggage
on the bed.”
Her father walked to
town in the off season,
15 miles a day, to cut
pulp wood. “We talked
about what our par-
ents sacrificed for us
and what we owed to
our children and all
other children simi-
larly situated.” They
often talked about
American leaders.
“There’s nobody who
Emily loved as a leader
of this country more
than she loved Joe Bi-
den, and we talked about Joe all the
time.”
He’d wrestled with whether to
make a public endorsement. Then a
friend died. He arrived early to the
funeral and walked around talking to
people he hadn’t seen in a while.
“There was an elderly lady in her up-
per 80s sitting on the front pew of
the church, just a few seats away
from the coffin. And she looked at
me and she beckoned to me. Didn’t
say a word, just beckoned.” He joined
her. “She said, ‘Lean down, I need to
ask you a question.’ And I leaned
down. She said, ‘You don’t have to
say it out loud, but you just whisper
into my ear. Who are you gonna vote
for next Saturday? I been waiting tohear from you. I need to hear from
you. This community wants to hear
from you.’ I decided then and there
that I would not stay silent.”
He quoted Martin Luther King Jr.,
who wrote that “he was coming to
the conclusion that the people of ill
will in our society was making a
much better use of time than the
people of good will, and he feared
that he would [have] regret—not just
for the vitriolic words and deeds of
bad people but for the appalling si-
lence from good people.”
He said, “South Carolina should
be voting for Joe Biden, and here’s
why.” Because the purpose of politics
isn’t lofty and abstract but simpler,
plainer: “Making the greatness ofthis country accessible
and affordable for all.
We don’t need to make
this country great
again—this country is
great, that’s not what
our challenge is.” The
challenge is making
greatness available to
everybody. Are people
able to get education,
health care, housing?
“Nobody with whom
I’ve ever worked in
public life is any more
committed” to that
goal “than Joe Biden.”
Theygottoknow
each other “doing TV
stuff together,” he
said. “I know Joe....
But most importantly,
Joe knows us.” They
used to talk a lot about
Brown v. Board of Ed-
ucation,which consoli-
dated five lawsuits
against school segre-
gation. One was from
Joe’s Delaware. They
went over it a lot.
“That’s how well I
know this man. I know
his heart. I know who
he is. I know what he
is.”
Mr. Clyburn said
that during his day in jail, “I was
never fearful of the future. As I stand
before you today I am fearful of the
future of this country. I’m fearful for
my daughters.” We have to “restore
this country’s dignity, this country’s
respect—that is what is at stake this
year.” And there is “no one better
suited, better prepared,” for the fight
“than my good friend, my late wife’s
great friend, Joe Biden.”
It was beautiful.
He wasn’t just giving Mr. Biden an
endorsement, he was giving him a
template: This is what to talk about,
this is yoursubject matter.
It was a speech about the price
you’ll pay to stand where you stand.
In outlining his life he was saying:Ididn’t talk the talk; I walked the
walk, and on that basis I claim some-
thing called authority.
But what would the impact be?
America is in a crisis not only of
leadership but of followership. Lead-
ers in all areas—business, the
church, politics, other institutions—
don’t know if they have the clout
anymore to guide and advise their
constituencies, they don’t know if
they have the heft, the sway. Surely
Mr. Clyburn wondered too.
And what followed was astound-
ing, a throwback. What needed say-
ing had been said, and spread. Three
days later South Carolina didn’t en-
dorse Joe Biden, it gave him a wave
that wouldn’t break, that swept
across the South and beyond.
After Super Tuesday, some pro-
gressives on social media clearly re-
sented the black vote and the Biden
wave. I detected in a few of them a
whiff of “Who are these old Southern
black ladies to be calling the shots?”
It took me aback.
You couldn’t carry their sandals,
sonnyboys.
A shooter came to Charleston a
few years ago and they were in the
Bible study. He kills, and they go to
the bail hearing and, in the great in-
candescent moment of the last de-
cade, say “I forgive you.”
They make everything happen;
they’re the ones who’ve long made
the prudential judgments on which
way the party will go.
For half a century it has been tell-
ing them, “We feel your pain, we’re
going to save you.” On Tuesday, after
coolly surveying the facts and the
field, they said to the Democratic
Party, “Honey, you’re confused. We
see your pain and we’re gonna save
you.”
And they did. It was something—a
turning of the tables, a doing what
others up North and out West
couldn’t quite do, and that was say-
ing, “We are not socialists, we’re
Democrats.”
The party should thank its lucky
stars. It should kiss those ladies’
hands.TERRY SHOFFNERN
o one has seen anything
like it. It will live in our
political lore. There’ll be
some bright 32-year-old
kid running a campaign
in 2056 and his guy will be down
three in a row and the elders will
take him to the Marriott bar and tell
him, “Ya gotta get out, handwriting’s
on the wall,” and he’ll nod, slump-
shouldered. Then he’ll get this steely
look, this young-wild-James-Carville
look, and he’ll say, “Joe Biden was
over in ’20. Nothing is written.”
There were many elements to
what happened. Democrats love to
say they’re not members of any or-
ganized political party, they’re Dem-
ocrats; they love to say Democrats
fall in love while Republicans fall in
line. That’s their self conception and
their story line and it’s mostly ma-
larkey, as someone would say. You
don’t get these staggered endorse-
ments and coordinated statements
without organization, power centers
and money lines.
But this is about the human part,
the historic part, the speech Rep.
Jim Clyburn gave that saved Mr. Bi-
den. It was Wednesday morning. Feb.
26, in the College Center at Trident
Technical College on Rivers Avenue
in North Charleston, S.C. Mr. Cly-
burn, the highest-ranking African-
American in Congress, spoke without
text or notes, just a man at a mic
with a blank wall behind him.
He spoke of his late wife, Emily.
He didn’t just endorse
Biden when his campaign
was in trouble. He showed
him how to revive it.
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A Chinese Mystery and Covid-19’s Economic Puzzle
Words I never
thought I’d read in
the New York
Times: “So Mr.
Trump has a
point.”
This concession
came in reference
to this week’s
highly unrealistic
death rate for
Covid-19 an-
nounced by the World Health Or-
ganization, upping its guesstimate
to 3.4%. Mr. Trump pooh-poohed
the figure in an on-air phone call
with Fox News’s Sean Hannity and
the Times could hardly jump on
the latest outrage bandwagon hav-
ing written itself one day earlier
that the figure “came loaded with
caveats.” The biggest of these cave-
ats, as you have read elsewhere, is
the probable failure of govern-
ments in China and elsewhere to
detect thousands of mild or symp-
tomless cases. In the New England
Journal of Medicine last week, U.S.
experts predicted that the Ameri-
can fatality rate may prove closer
to the flu’s 0.1%.
To seek is to find with the new
coronavirus infection. Until recently,
the U.S. was doing the equivalent of
looking for its lost keys under a
streetlight by confining its testingto those with a demonstrable con-
nection to an infected area or per-
son. This was never a reason to
take comfort that Covid-19 wasn’t
already here and spreading.
Containment means quickly
tracing the contacts of sick people
and encouraging them to quaran-
tine themselves, as well as closing
schools, workplaces and public
events. In the U.S. and other
countries, it probably will not in-
volve the forcible imprisoning of
healthy people in their homes as
adopted in parts of China. Con-
tainment nonetheless is the strat-
egy recommended by the World
Health Organization.
In contrast, mitigation means
accepting that the virus is running
flu-like through society and focus-
ing on the severely ill. As with the
flu, the elderly and those in bad
health are most in jeopardy. Hun-
dreds of such people die a week
from “acute respiratory distress” in
the best of times (a whole research
literature exists to examine which
of these patients gain meaningful
benefit from being kept alive with
ventilators).
Now this question becomes so-
cietal. At what point should we
stop working so hard to prevent
transmission to people who most
likely will have a mild flu- or cold-
like experience in hopes of pre-
venting a small percentage of se-
vere cases that require costly
medical intervention?
Containment, after all, has costs
for people’s well-being too: It de-
prives them of jobs and income as
travel is curtailed, events are calledoff, and restaurants and other busi-
nesses empty out in ways that
don’t happen with the flu.
A debate in the British govern-
ment and undoubtedly other gov-
ernments was described in blunt
terms by the Times of London this
week: “Ministers and officials are
considering the trade-off between
allowing an acute outbreak, from
which the economy would rebound
more quickly, or trying to save
more lives by imposing restric-
tions on mass gatherings and
transport.”This remarkably important de-
bate is now roiled by the uncer-
tainty out of China. Even as the
government there may have
changed tactics and started abet-
ting Maoist-style rumors that the
virus originated in the U.S., visiting
experts have credited an astonish-
ing turnaround. Cases in the epi-
center of Wuhan have plummeted
precipitously. The spread of the ep-
idemic to other provinces seems to
have been all but curtailed.
In a startling statement, the
WHO’s Michael Ryan claimed in a
Monday briefing: “Here we have a
disease for which we have no vac-
cine, no treatment, we don’t fully
understand transmission, we don’tfully understand case mortality, but
what we have been genuinely
heartened by is that unlike influ-
enza, where countries have fought
back, where they’ve put in place
strong measures, we’ve remarkably
seen that the virus is suppressed.”
Dr. Ryan here suggests the new
coronavirus may be unflu-like in its
susceptibility to containment but
it’s hard to know since nothing
similar has ever been tried with
the ordinary flu, which is believed
to kill upward of 300,000 globally
every year.
An unquantifiable factor (if this
picture of Chinese success holds
up) is how much is due to the
strong-arming of the Chinese gov-
ernment and how much to the vol-
untary compliance of the Chinese
people, who apparently have taken
to heart instructions to stay home,
wash their hands and cover their
mouths when sneezing. Witness ac-
counts describe neighbors pressing
on travelers alcohol-soaked cotton
balls to clean their hands and
packs of tissues to be used when
pushing elevator buttons. Chinese
internet companies reportedly use
cellphone and social-media data to
alert users when and where they
may have crossed paths with an in-
fected person.
To repeat, nothing similar has
been tried with respect to flu out-
breaks that kill thousands a year
because, until now, nobody thought
it worth doing. Publics everywhere
accepted flu risk (which Covid-
may be no worse than) as a cost of
going about their lives in the
world.BUSINESS
WORLD
By Holman W.
Jenkins, Jr.
Has Beijing ‘contained’ the
virus? If so, was the cost
worth the benefit, and
would it be for the U.S.?