A recent Wall Street Journal/Apple Podcast feature notes that about 20 people die in the U.S. daily because of a shortage of available organs for transplant. Another 120,000 are waiting for organs.
Jim Locke, a resident of the Village of Fernandina, is on the front lines of the battle. He is a clinical perfusionist – a medical professional who keeps organs for transplant viable and is an integral part of the surgical room team during the transplant procedure.
Although reports of skin grafts and other simple transplant surgeries go back three thousand years or more, it wasn’t until 1954 that surgeons in Boston successfully transplanted a kidney from a 23-year-old man into his identical twin brother.
“The biggest roadblock for transplants is caused by rejection,” Jim explains. “The body doesn’t want any foreign objects in it, so it uses its defense systems to attack the implanted organ. In the early 1980s the first anti-rejection drugs were introduced, and the growth of transplant centers started.” About the same time Congress introduced the National Organ Transplant Act to monitor ethical issues and address the organ shortage.
“I think part of the reason there is an organ shortage today is that we’re getting better at identifying patients that need an organ earlier in the process, while they are stronger, and their chance of survival is better,” Jim says.
Becoming a clinical perfusionist was not on young Jim Locke’s mind growing up in southeastern Ohio, but he arrived there through a series of life’s twists and turns.
“I started working when I was about 14,” Jim says. “Then I got a job in a department store in domestics – draperies and household stuff. I wasn’t very good at it, they let me go, and my father, who was the business manager at the local hospital, sent me there to get a job.”
He worked as an orderly for a while, then asked if he could watch some surgery.
“Two surgeries the first day – a hernia operation and a leg amputation. I was hooked. I wanted to work in surgery. Eventually I ended up in a hospital in Columbus, scrubbing in surgery, when they asked me if I wanted to learn hemodynamics,” which involves using specialized equipment to monitor and control blood flow in the body. “Later I was hired on a transplant team where I learned preservation of organs such as kidneys, heart, lungs, liver and pancreas. For a while I was a tissue bank director where tendons, ligaments, bones and other body tissues are kept viable for transplant.”
Today Jim works with an agency that provides contract specialists, such as clinical perfusionists, to surgical transplant teams in Central Florida and the Panhandle. He may transport a donated organ from one hospital to another, using portable equipment to keep it viable. Then he will scrub in and assist the surgical team with the transplant procedure, maintaining the organ to be transplanted.
Keeping the organs viable involves a combination of circulating fluids and low temperature, but the organs are not warmed before being implanted in the body. As soon as the new blood flow is restored, the organ regains body temperature within a few seconds.
“The most difficult part of the job is the stories of the donors,” he says. “An accident victim, a young mother who has had post-partum complications, someone who had a stroke.” The best part of the job, he notes, is the lives that are saved by the organ transplants.
Though organ preservation is Jim’s career, music is his passion. He can be seen and heard playing guitar with The Renegades in The Villages squares and at private parties throughout the area. Music came into his life with the arrival of The Beatles.
“My grandmother got me a Sears Silvertone acoustic guitar when I was about 10 and I took a few lessons.” He wasn’t particularly good at practicing the lessons, “But I kept trying to recreate some stuff.”
Skip ahead about nine years, Jim was working in the hospital until 3:30 every day.
“I had the fever,” he recounts after hearing Dickey Betts playing on an Allman Brothers cut. “I’d come home and play the guitar until 9 pm. Did that for a year and a half. Drove the neighbors nuts because I played loud and I wasn’t very good,” he laughs.
He owns about 15 guitars including Fenders and Gibsons and plays all of them regularly. He bought several to restore, learning how to get that mirror-like finish, taking the surface down to bare wood and trying different restoration techniques.
Another one of Jim’s passions is SCUBA diving.
“Probably my most memorable dive was at night in Hawaii with the manta rays,” he recalls. “Our group formed a circle, about 40 feet down, with our powerful lights pointed straight up. The plankton swam into the light and then the mantas swooped down into our circle to scoop up the plankton.” They were about 10 to 14 feet wide with a two to three-foot mouth. “We were on their turf. It’s pretty awesome. Very awesome!”
John W Prince is a writer and Villages resident. Learn more at www.GoMyStory.com.
