One evening, Shaun was in a daze at home when a knock suddenly came at the door. He opened it and found his neighbor, who wanted to borrow a few AA batteries. It was the first time Shaun had spoken to his neighbor, and he felt a little nervous—but the neighbor was so focused on her game that she didn’t notice. After Shaun gave her the batteries, she went back to her own apartment.
The next day, Dr. Brown received a call from the medical center, informing her that a suitable liver had been found for Chuck’s transplant. Overjoyed, Brown rushed to share the news with Dr. Melendez. As Chuck’s attending physician, Brown had assumed she would perform the transplant surgery. To her surprise, however, Melendez arranged for her to go to San Francisco with Shaun to retrieve the organ.
There was only an 8-hour window between when an organ is removed and when it must be transplanted into a new body. Though Brown was upset about the arrangement, she agreed to go with Shaun for Chuck’s sake. To save time, the hospital arranged a helicopter for transportation—the first time Shaun had ever been on one. During the flight, Brown complained to Shaun about Melendez’s unfairness, but Shaun paid no attention; he was completely immersed in the beautiful scenery below.
Soon, Shaun and Brown arrived at the hospital in San Francisco. Unexpectedly, the organ had already been removed from the donor’s body for 3 hours by the time they got there—meaning the window for saving it was even more urgent. After checking the organ’s condition, Shaun and Brown hurried to leave. But when Shaun examined the liver, he sensed something was wrong. Brown insisted it was fine, so the two placed the organ in a cooler and set off.
Just as Shaun and Brown were about to return to the rooftop to take the helicopter back, heavy fog made it impossible for the helicopter to fly. Brown immediately went to negotiate with the hospital, asking them to send an ambulance. However, all the hospital’s ambulances were out on duty and unavailable. In the end, Brown decided to ask the police for an escort.
When the police car arrived to pick them up, Shaun hesitated to get in. The flashing police lights had triggered a childhood memory: after his younger brother fell to his death, the police had tried to take Shaun home, but he had refused to get out of the car, terrified of being beaten by his father. Police cars held a painful, specific meaning for him. Seeing this, Brown asked the officers to turn off the lights, and Shaun finally got in the car.
Back at the hospital, an important patient named Wernermaker had arrived—someone who could bring a large sum of funding to the hospital, so the board took his case very seriously. Dr. Marcus was supposed to perform Wernermaker’s surgery, but the board wanted Melendez to assist him. Marcus saw this as an insult and refused, but after Aaron persuaded him, he eventually changed his mind.
On their way back to the hospital in the police car, Brown noticed that the temperature inside the cooler was rising—if it kept up, the liver would soon become non-viable. She asked the driver to stop at a convenience store, then went inside to fill the cooler with slushies. The temperature gradually dropped, and they continued their journey. Along the way, Shaun kept replaying his doubts about the organ in his mind. Suddenly, it clicked: the liver felt slightly harder than normal tissue, and he realized the cause was a blood clot inside. After careful analysis, Brown agreed with Shaun’s judgment. To save the organ, the two decided to perform an emergency procedure on the liver right there on the side of the road—and successfully removed the clot.
While Shaun and Brown were rushing back to the hospital, Melendez and Jared performed a pre-op check on Chuck. They made a devastating discovery: Chuck had violated pre-surgery rules by drinking alcohol. Patients are prohibited from drinking alcohol for 6 months before a liver transplant, but Chuck had snuck a small drink at his daughter’s graduation 3 days earlier—an act that could disqualify him from the transplant. Chuck begged Melendez to fight for him. Melendez used a formula to calculate whether the alcohol in Chuck’s system would interfere with the surgery and explained the situation to the hospital. In the end, however, the hospital decided to follow the rules and revoked Chuck’s transplant eligibility.