Good Blood: A Doctor, a Donor, and the Incredible Breakthrough that Saved Millions of Babies

CHAPTER ONE

The Making of a Superhero

James Christopher Harrison peered out the paned living-room window of his family home in the railway town of Junee in New South Wales, Australia. He rubbed a circle where his breath fogged up the glass. His mates were out playing cricket in the street, and the ten-year-old pleaded with his mom to let him out.

They don’t have enough players! he protested.

"Mum, they need me!" he tried again.

"They have a terrible bowler!" he said of the pitcher.

James’s desperate entreaties went nowhere, blending into the background noise of the whistle of passing trains and the shouts and cheers of his friends in the street.

He had been ordered indoors until his latest cold passed, a torturous fate for a boy who just wanted to play like the rest of the kids in the small town. With big, dark brown eyes, light hair, and an innocent expression that masked a mischievous streak, James had always been a small and sickly child, picking up any cold or bug that went around Junee in the 1940s. During World War II, James’s mom received extra rations of butter, milk, meat, and bread because of James’s poor health. She tried her best to fatten him up with his favorites, bangers and mash and stone fruit pies.

Finally, after lunch, when the neighborhood boys had moved on from their game of cricket and taken their makeshift wicket with them, James resorted to a game of tag with his younger sister inside the house. No matter that he still hadn’t finished his meal. As he raced around the house while eating, he ran into a wall, and the spoon in his mouth was violently launched into the back of his throat. Off to the hospital they went—again.

James Harrison at around age four, Junee, Australia.

When James wasn’t battling some ailment, he was outdoors every moment he could grab, playing cricket or inventing battles, games, and races with his best friends, Ronny and Johnny Marshall.

One weekend afternoon, the three boys decided it was time for a race to the railroad tracks on their bikes. James had Ronny perched on the handlebars of his rickety bike, while Johnny was on his own bike, gunning to pass them. The boys had a block to go before crossing the train tracks that sliced through Junee. The whistle of the approaching train propelled them forward like the starter pistol at a race. James stood in his seat, gripped his handlebars, and glanced back at his competition.

Holy smokes! Johnny yelled.

Just then, a truck of some sort careened around the corner, coming out of nowhere. James veered but wasn’t quick enough and smashed headlong into the back of the fast-moving vehicle. Johnny veered and just missed the pileup but slid across the road. Slowly, unsteadily, the bruised and battered boys picked themselves up.

Crikey—what happened? James said, helping Ronny up.

James scratched his head with a bleeding hand and said, How did the medics get here so fast?

You idiot! said one of the boys. Look!

When the reality of what had happened set in, the ribbing began: Only James Harrison would run into the back of an ambulance.

These were the kind of scrapes and scares that punctuated James Harrison’s boyhood. But when he landed back in the hospital in 1951, it was for something far more serious than bruises, cuts, and bad colds. James, now fourteen, had caught something he couldn’t shake. A bug had turned into bronchitis and then triple pneumonia. Penicillin was doing nothing to prevent the infection from spreading from one lung to the other. The tissue of James’s lungs was inflamed, and he coughed constantly, complaining of sharp chest pains.

James was transported to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney in a bid to save his life. There, James’s mom and dad, Peggy and Reginald, met with a young surgeon, Harry Windsor, who had honed his skills as a doctor during World War II, serving mostly in New Guinea with the Australian Army Medical Corps. Dr. Windsor had made a name for himself at St. Vincent’s through his pioneering work in heart valve surgeries. He had established the thoracic surgery department, and even organized the hospital’s staff cricket team, serving as coach. He endeared himself to his surgery patients by sleeping next to their beds.

But the operation involving young James would be Dr. Windsor’s first pediatric pulmonary lobectomy, and James was in bad shape. The lobectomy of the lung was a surgical operation to remove an infected or diseased portion of the lung. Dr. Windsor was not certain whether the boy would make it.

I’ve got my lucky penny, James told the doctor when they met, showing him a flattened coin. He explained that he and his friends would wait for the trains of Junee to get close before placing pennies on the tracks and watching them get squashed. The boys had pockets full of squashed pennies.

James charmed doctors and nurses alike with his chatter and good spirits. In the days leading up to the surgery, James endured relentless tests, gagging every time antiseptic was sprayed into his mouth, and closing his eyes when exploratory tubes were pushed down his throat. The tubes felt larger than his throat. When they were removed, James could finally uncurl his fists and run his fingers over his flat penny. The nurses came to him every day for blood draws. Of the four major blood groups—A, B, AB, and O—James was universal blood type O negative, the blood of choice in emergency rooms and for use in transfusions. Just 7 percent of the population has O negative blood. With no major blood group antigens, O negative blood is the ideal for recipients with any blood type. But James, as O negative, could only safely receive transfusions of O negative blood. The positive or negative factors on one’s blood were determined by a protein called the Rh factor, which can be present (+) or absent (–), creating the eight most common blood types of A+, A–, B+, B–, O+, O–, AB+, AB–. Compatible blood for transfusions meant the difference between life and death.

The nurses complimented James on his prominent veins. He may have been weak and pale and prone to coughing bouts that were exhausting even to watch, but his veins were as strong as the Australian sun in summertime, he was told.

The nurses did their best to distract him from the tubes and needles by asking about girls, cricket, tennis, and school. James didn’t mind having a gaggle of pretty nurses around, and he told them stories of how he earned pocket change by selling the eggs of his family’s chickens to refugees who’d arrived in Junee after the war. He talked gaily about his mishaps and adventures, including the time he’d scared his mother nearly to death by flinging himself across the train tracks to see whether an approaching train would stop. His mates Ronny and Johnny had pulled him off the tracks in the nick of time. Peggy, upon learning of the incident, said she’d kill him herself and chased after him with a wooden spoon.

The nurses and nuns at St. Vincent’s were briefed on the risks of James’s surgery. They admired how James did a lot with a little, and could only imagine what sort of mischief he’d get into if given the gift of good health.

When surgery day arrived, James’s parents forced reassuring smiles while fighting back tears. James’s father, Reginald, was a mechanic who fixed the wheels on the country’s steam-powered locomotives. He never missed a Sunday church service, sang in the choir—becoming emotional with every rendition of Amazing Grace—and was the town Santa Claus. As Dr. Windsor explained the surgery, Reginald nodded, solemn and deferential. Dr. Windsor had told the Harrisons that he believed the best hope for their son was to remove the necrotic and infected parts of his right lung before it spread to the left side. There was a chance the doctor would have to remove the entire right lung. James’s single remaining lung could inflate to take up some of the extra space, the doctor explained, allowing him—assuming all went well during surgery—to function normally. But the high-risk surgery would culminate in a high-risk recovery. Lung surgery involved a great deal of bleeding. Patients who bleed excessively during surgery are at risk of continuing to bleed after surgery, because the loss of platelets impairs the body’s ability to make clots.

James’s younger sister, Margaret, who was nine years old, stood next to their mother. She knew the situation was serious because they were in the big hospital in Sydney, rather than in their small hospital in Junee. A Sisters of Charity nun walked beside the gurney that carried James. The nun told Peggy and Margaret that she would stay with James through the operation. For the first time since being hospitalized, James was scared. His long bouts of coughing had left him depleted. He’d had a fever off and on and had been in the hospital for a week now. He just wanted to get back to racing around town and playing cricket in the street. But he smiled bravely. He could see his parents were worried. A few minutes later, it was time for him to be wheeled away.

In the operating theater, an overhead light the size of a manhole shone on James. Faces in white cloth masks peered down at him; he recognized the nurses by their eyes. The anesthetist, inducing with ethyl chloride spray on a cloth, and continuing with an ether drip, told him to count back from ten. Instead, James launched into one of his sweet but rambling tales. My schoolmates like to sneak a puff of a ciggy behind a building where the teachers can’t see, he began. I never once did that . . . James trailed off as the anesthesia took hold. The team quickly went to work, double checking the inventory on tables and trays, including the sponges, towels, clamps, scissors, scalpels, saws, and other instruments. A glass bottle of blood hung on an IV stand next to James. The use of glass bottles for blood donations, surgery, and storage dated to World War I—then the first glass cylinders were coated with a film of paraffin to delay clotting, and packed into ammunition boxes converted into shipping containers filled with ice and sawdust.

Dr. Windsor conferred with the anesthetist and checked James’s vital signs. He made the first incision below James’s sternum. He slowly cut in what he called a lazy S pattern toward the wall of the shoulder blade and spine. He cut through skin first, then fat—James was thin as a rail—and then continued the incision into the subcutaneous tissue and muscle. When he reached the chest wall and the rib cage, a nurse handed him a rib spreader. Dr. Windsor began to spread James’s ribs, one crank at a time, like jacking up a car to repair a tire. To get to the muscles between the ribs and access the lungs, he would need to remove at least one rib.

Reaching the lungs, Dr. Windsor could see that the infection was worse than he had thought. The three lobes of James’s right lung appeared necrotic. The tissue had died, and the space between the lung and the chest wall was filled with abnormal fluid, bacteria, and pus. Dr. Windsor suctioned the infection and peeled away hardened areas, like he was removing skin from an orange.

Sweat formed on Dr. Windsor’s brow. James’s blood pressure was dropping; he was hemorrhaging.

More blood! Dr. Windsor ordered. He had never had a patient undergo such a massive transfusion. The use of transfusions had developed over several centuries, beginning with the discovery of the circulation of blood in 1628 and the first recorded successful blood transfusion in England in 1665, when a dog was kept alive by the transfused blood of other dogs. Further advancements had been made during World War II. The understanding of blood type compatibility involving the Rhesus factor—giving people the positive or negative to their blood type—was just over a decade old.

James had about eight pints of blood in his body and was losing blood as fast as it was being replaced. He had already received four pints of transfused blood—half the volume of the blood in his body. James’s breathing grew shallow and rapid and his heart rate accelerated.

More bottles of blood were rushed in for transfusion. Dr. Windsor, focused on the surgery, was relying on his nursing team to ensure that blood typing and crossmatching were executed to exclude incompatible mixtures for transfusion. A nurse wiped the doctor’s brow. Others sopped up the blood around the incisions. Towels heavy with blood were piled on trays. Dr. Windsor eyeballed the amount of blood he had suctioned from James and released into canisters. James’s arteries were constricting to prevent more blood loss, which could lead to organ failure. In the corner, the nun prayed the Rosary, her fingers moving from one bead to the next. The hours passed with this dance between life and death. Death approached, death was averted. Blood was lost, blood was given.

In the waiting room, James’s family grew more anxious as day turned into night. Ten hours into the surgery, Reginald and Peggy still knew nothing. They tried not to imagine the worst.

Finally, after eleven hours of surgery, Dr. Windsor was done. James had received thirteen units of blood. His blood was no longer his own.

The necrotic lung tissue was on a tray. Dr. Windsor sewed up James’s lungs, then the tissues, progressing methodically as if closing a door to each room he had entered. He then focused on closing James up. He sutured James’s skin, making more than one hundred stitches by hand in a jagged line running from his chest to the middle of his back. As he worked, more transfused blood flowed into James’s veins, moving through his wan body, replenishing what he’d lost. Now this brave boy, a fighter if ever there was one, would need to get through recovery.

When James awoke in the ICU, his family was all around him. The nun was there, too; she had stayed with him through it all. James faced tough days ahead, and he would have to remain in the hospital for months. He looked around his room. His parents were beaming, and told him he had done great. His father came bedside and clasped his hand.

You were saved by the blood of strangers, Reginald said. You would have died without the gift of blood.

James knew that his father was a regular blood donor. With a sense of responsibility that belied his daredevil acts on the train tracks, James told his family, I will return the favor.

No one could have known that day in 1951 how true that was. The transfused blood that saved his life was altering James’s very chemistry, mobilizing his antibodies, changing him at a molecular level—and creating a life force for others.

CHAPTER TWO

The Blood Detective

Hundreds of passengers cheered and waved from the deck of the Queen Mary as the impressive ocean liner entered New York harbor in the summer of 1955. The spectacular Manhattan skyline and the nearby Statue of Liberty captivated émigrés and tourists alike, and everyone on board wanted to cherish the moment of the ship’s berthing at Pier 90, their gateway into the United States.

But one passenger was curiously absent among the celebrating masses. Three decks below, twenty-four-year-old John Doc Gorman was stealing one last glimpse of a thing of beauty: the engine room, with its massive turning gears, propellers, pipes, turbines, and valves that adjusted the amount of steam that powered the ship. For Gorman, a young doctor traveling on a cheap fare from Australia to make his name in America, the luxurious splendor of the Queen Mary’s ballrooms paled in comparison to the engine room, even with its extreme heat and excessive noise.

Look at that, Gorman said to himself while studying the machinery and scribbling notes. During his voyage, he had learned the intricacies and force of the engines, which produced sixteen tons of steam heated to 700 degrees Fahrenheit (370°C) every minute. From his perspective, the other passengers didn’t know what they were missing. He had been thrilled early in the voyage when some of the machinists invited him in for a tour. Maybe they took pity on him, seeing that his cabin was next door to the engine room.

Gorman bid farewell to the greasers, firemen, engineers, and trimmers in the engine room, grabbed his bag, and dashed through the narrow passageways and up the flights of stairs. They had arrived in America! On the main deck, out of breath, he beheld another glorious sight—the Empire State Building, the tallest manmade structure on Earth.

Gorman had never seen a skyscraper, let alone a whole city of skyscrapers. New York City had been his dream destination for as long as he could remember. It was big, fast, tall, and bustling—a place of ideas. He had been a big fish in a little pond back home in Australia. Now he wondered whether he could become a big fish in this place teeming with the ambition and industry of nearly eight million people.

What Gorman knew of America came from copies of the New Yorker, Newsweek, and Time that his father shared with him at home in Bendigo, the town where gold was discovered in Australia. As a boy, he read the magazines cover to cover in his dusty workshop in the family’s garage, where he toiled away on circuits, built boomerangs, and pieced together radios from vacuum tubes. Growing up, he’d wanted to be an engineer or physicist, and he was also drawn to math, regularly challenging himself to feats of mental arithmetic, from predictive modeling to concepts of integrals and derivatives and more. His father was his best teacher.

By the age of five, John knew the names of every country and every capital in the world. He did advanced math while still in elementary school.

As the first-born son of two doctors, it was expected that young John would also become a doctor. He started medical school at sixteen, having skipped grades because of his high test-scores—something that confounded those who knew him to sleep through classes or miss them altogether. John wasn’t a fan of waking early or taking orders. For as long as he could remember, he had found school tedious and looked for any opportunity to play hooky. One day when he was around seven years old, he ditched school to head to town. Turning the corner, he ran smack into his father, who was more than a little surprised to see his boy cruising down Main Street in the middle of a school day. During his six years of medical school at the University of Melbourne, his friends—who christened him Doc before he was one—also marveled at how he passed his exams when he seemed to always be sleeping, inventing, or golfing.

Left to right: John Gorman with his younger brother, Frank, and sister Jocelyn, Rochester, Australia.

Now navigating the busy streets of Manhattan, Gorman was unlikely to run into anyone remotely familiar. But the sheer rush of so many people was its own kind of jolt. After taking several wrong turns and stopping to crane his neck at the skyscrapers, he finally arrived at his studio apartment. He had free room and board and would earn $50 a month as a pediatrics resident at St. Francis Hospital in the South Bronx. Settling into his new home, he began to unpack his few belongings, including a treasured book, Ideas Have Consequences, given to him by his father. He found the book interesting, but it was the title that spoke to him.

With the nearly two-month journey behind him, John’s thoughts returned to the morning he’d left Australia. He’d sailed out of the port of Melbourne on a ship called the SS Orcades. There he stood on the top deck, squeezed shoulder to shoulder with other passengers, everyone holding streamers connected to loved ones on the dock below. John was connected to his mother, Doris, by a white streamer that seemed to run the length of a football field. John held one end, Doris the other. As the ship’s horns sounded and the Orcades slowly pulled away, streamers broke all around, floating through the air like confetti. John and his mother held theirs for as long as possible, with John stretching out beyond the deck’s rail and his mother moving toward him on the dock below. But in an instant, the tie between mother and son broke. Doris waved tearfully, still holding her part of the streamer. The image played over and over in his mind. He was now on his own. He would focus on his work—and on becoming someone of note.

Drifting off to sleep in his new apartment, John remembered the