Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

So, you've had your appointments, left seemingly gallons of blood for testing, and lost countless hours of sleep. And then, your transplant team (surgeon, social worker, psychologist, specialty Doctors -- eg. hepatologist, pulmonologist, etc..., and your transplant coordinator) have a meeting, and then you are voted on. To list, or not to list? With any "luck", you soon get the good news -- you are being placed on the transplant list!

At this point, your transplant coordinator will contact you and input your information into UNOS (the website mentioned in an earlier post). The staff there is then responsible to store your information, gather information about donated organs, and find an appropriate match. But what if there are numerous matches? Who gets the organ?

This is where the "score" comes in. In the case of a liver transplant, your score is called a MELD or PELD score. According to UNOS, "The Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) and Pediatric End-Stage Liver Disease (PELD) are numerical scales that are currently used for liver allocation. The MELD and PELD scores are based on a patient's risk of dying while waiting for a liver transplant, and are based on objective and verifiable medical data."

Translation: These scores are an objective indication of how sick you are. In theory, this is intended to prevent a certain billionaire (who shall remain nameless) from receiving a liver when he is not the most deserving based on purely medical reasons. And after simply writing that, I can already feel the operating system on my laptop crashing and destroying all of my stored information... Just to be on the safe side, please disregard the theoretical reference to any billionaire computer moguls above!