Robert King was driving home from work Saturday evening — Lake Michigan dancing to the east, the skyline glistening to the north — when traffic on Lake Shore Drive slowed to a crawl.
A green-and-white van that sped past King moments earlier, lights and sirens blaring, sat along the roadside in a mangled heap. King pulled over to see if anyone needed help.
“I asked, ‘Hey, what’s going on? Everybody all right?’ ” King, 50, recalled. “This gentleman said, ‘Yeah, can you please help us? Can you get us to the hospital?’ I said, ‘Sure. No problem. Let me pull out of the way.’ ”
The gentleman, it turns out, was Kofi Atiemo, an organ transplant surgeon from Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The green-and-white vehicle, which had been T-boned while waiting at a stoplight, was an organ transplant vehicle on its way to Northwestern. A patient was prepped and waiting to be transplanted with its contents.
“There were lots of people just driving by, but Robert was willing to stop,” Atiemo said. “Before he could even say anything else, Justin threw the organs in the back of the car, and we hopped in. It all happened so quickly.”
(Justin is Justin Smith, an organ procurement specialist at Northwestern.)
“As I’m driving, that’s when he told me he was a doctor and it was organs inside of the boxes,” King said. “I was like, ‘Wow.’ I was just in shock. I thought he could’ve just been somebody taking food to the hospital. I thought it could’ve been files or something. I don’t know!”
It wasn’t files. It was a liver, a kidney and a pancreas that Atiemo had just procured from a deceased donor at MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island. The donor gave her heart, too, but a heart team transported that in a separate vehicle, eventually heading to a patient...READ MORE
