For each of them that grueling, tragic, miracle-touched week, the intersection of life and death began with a single call.
5:20 p.m. Tuesday: In Massachusetts, the telephone rang minutes after Ken and Jeanne McBride got home from work. A D.C. police officer was on the line. Their elder son, an aspiring bike patrolman, had been taken to the hospital after falling ill on a training ride. His condition was unclear, the officer said; they should fly to Washington. The McBrides packed fast and caught the last shuttle out of Boston.
1 a.m. Thursday: An exhausted Annettor Murphy was asleep at her sister's house in Southern Maryland, just back from another hospital stay, another reprieve until her body again started failing. It was her sister who heard the phone and got the news; within seconds, she was upstairs, screaming ecstatically. They had to drive back to Washington, she told Murphy. A liver was finally there for her.
One family, deep in mourning. The other, veering between hope and fear. They were strangers to each other and likely to remain so, because the system that recovers and distributes human organs zealously guards the confidentiality of all involved. Most recipients learn little about the people who have given them a second chance at living.
This time would have been no different -- except for a third call.
7 a.m. Thursday: D.C. police Sgt. Kimberly Taylor picked up the phone at the 1st Police District station in Southwest Washington. For hours, she had held emotion in check while others around her grieved; James Craig McBride had been one of their own, a popular presence in 1D. But now, Taylor's cousin was on the line. Her aunt, he said, was back at Georgetown University Hospital and about to get a transplant. The liver was coming from a donor at Washington Hospital Center.
"What did you say?" Taylor demanded, instantly making the connection. She began shaking and ran into her commander's office.
"McBride . . . " she sobbed, barely able to get her words out. "McBride's saved my auntie's life."
By afternoon, she and the officer's parents would be embracing.
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Annettor Murphy, 61, no longer remembers her first symptoms. They surfaced more than 11 years ago, landing her in hospital after hospital, with doctor after doctor unsure of what was wrong. By the time surgeon Lynt Johnson met her, she was critically ill, on a ventilator and suffering liver and kidney failure. Johnson expected her to die.
Murphy's medical problems, it turned out, stemmed from a rare syndrome that causes blood clots to form in the veins of the liver. Although she pulled through the first emergency, myriad complications followed, including her body's relentless, debilitating accumulation of fluid. So extreme was the buildup that every few weeks for the next decade, Murphy would go to a hospital to have as much as 3 1/2 gallons of fluid drained from her abdomen. She struggled on until pain and disability forced her to quit her job as a D.C. correctional officer. Her only salvation, Johnson believed, would be a transplant.
