It’s late Monday morning and Jack Lynch is on call. His pager beeps, interrupting his snack of coffee and chocolate cake from Debra’s Dough at Dearborn Station. He reads the messages from his pager out loud over the cheerful jazz music that fills the atrium. “Twenty-six-year-old African-American male gunshot wound to the head…37-year-old African-American male head trauma.” Lynch lowers his head with a sudden weariness. “I get these types of pages five to seven times a week, and 75 percent of the time these people are victims of some kind of social trauma. Preventable deaths.”
Though almost 16 years have passed, Lynch has seen little change in the waiting rooms at Cook County Hospital. Then as now, the very young and the very old waited together to be seen. Dusty floor fans blew air in a single direction to compensate for the weak air-conditioning, merely muting the collective warmth of the bodies packed side by side for hours on end. Lynch watched as one distraught family after another, usually poor and unfamiliar with medical jargon, absently nodded their heads while doctors, usually white, tried to explain the brain death of their loved ones. They’d wait to mention organ donation until the end of the speech. “I’m required by law to ask you this,” they would say (as in “This isn’t my idea, so please don’t kill me”). “Would you be willing to donate the organs?”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Organ donation was the last thing a family wanted to discuss after hours of waiting and feeling ignored. The answer was usually no. But even after watching processions of doctors, nurses, and clergy members fail to gain consent, Lynch was not discouraged. He saw a pattern and formed a theory from it. “Families were being talked at by people who believed that they had covered all the necessary bases and, in fact, were just giving information.” He concluded that the keys to a successful approach were better communication skills (“mastering the art of talking with, not talking at”) and forethought (“you need to have a game plan instead of just a voice”).
Lynch claims to be in a hurry when he arrives at the hospital, but he still finds time to share a group hug with two nurses on his way to the ER. He walks down a hallway, passing through two sets of double doors, and shows the security guard his visitor pass and the ROBI ID attached to the bottom of his suit jacket. “Organ recovery team,” he says, like an FBI agent brandishing a badge. The guard buzzes him through. Doctors, nurses, and orderlies dash around, hardly looking up from their charts, computers, or patients; some sixth sense tells them when someone is in their path and they either step aside or murmur an “excuse me.” Death, trauma, and sickness are visible all around: A toddler with a nail through her eyelid. An unconscious man with gauze around his head, bright red blood bleeding through. Over the beeps of medical machinery, a man who had been checked in for a mental evaluation yells at no one in particular, “Helloooo. Helloooo. Get up off your ass!” Some of the patients stare openly at Lynch, who glides across the ER, shoulders back, taking it all in with a single glance. He’s the only man in the room in a suit and tie (“I don’t endorse casual”), and he attracts attention like Michigan Avenue attracts tourists.
Some might call it fate that Lynch and ROBI crossed paths just as everything was beginning to change in the field of organ donation and transplantation. ROBI barely existed the summer Lynch spent at Cook County Hospital’s trauma center.
“They armed me with a phone and a pager and told me to go home,” says Lynch about the early days at ROBI. “They would call me if someone black was a potential organ donor.” Even then he knew a phone and pager would not be enough to remedy all of the issues that kept black people from donating their organs. “It was wrong just to have someone of color approach a family simply based on the fact that [because] they’re black they’re supposed to understand.”
