DOCTORS » DR. A “We could do a marketing campaign to get kidney donors” proposes Doctor X. “We could convert people further from death” proposes Doctor Y. “Run the existing vampires for longer? Somehow make it so their bodies can process more waste?” “Harvest genetically modified kidneys from pigs” “Switch everyone to peritoneal dialysis” “Prioritize dialysis patients.” I wrote each of these proposals on the white board, both to have an agenda and to help anyone brainstorm a new idea. Doctors X and Y were the most vocal, but many of their suggests were murmured by other doctors in the room. There were twelve of us: like a jury that needs to determine the sentence… the fate… of more than thirty thousand dialysis patients. They were already convicted by whatever caused their kidneys to fail. The obvious sentence was simply death. But hemodialysis can prevent that, if we have enough resources for it. How do we return to the same level of dialysis resources now that thousands of vampires went on strike? “Let’s walk through these one-by-one and describe their details and characteristics. Starting with ‘donors’ ” I begin for the group. Again Doctors X and Y tend to vocalize what others in the room murmur… their accents were similar enough it was even hard to tell them apart with my back turned to write, so I started to think of everyone as just ‘the room’. “Donors: Massive marketing campaign to get people to provide one of their two kidneys. Start transplanting kidneys into the pool of dialysis patients. An advantage is we know all this technology. A disadvantage is we only do a few thousand living donor transplants a year. This would be a massive increase in that double donor-torecipient surgery procedure. For thirty thousand patients the cost would be about five billion dollars. It would take years to successfully transplant all of them, assuming a mass willingness of the public to
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