Over My Dead Body by Hazel McHaffie

Over My Dead Body by Hazel McHaffie
Buy Over My Dead Body by Hazel McHaffie at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Literary Fiction
Reviewer: Gloria Nneoma Onwuneme
Summary: Hazel McHaffie, who has previously featured particularly contentious issues of medical ethics in works of fiction, does the same with the matter of organ donation in this book.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 212	Date: September 2013
Publisher: VelvetEthics Press
ISBN: 9780992623104
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The mother of a patient in dire need of a heart, and a pair of lungs, ceases to pray for the survival of her son for the following uncomfortable reason: 'Feels like you're asking for somebody else to die.' Though merely an extra in the main plot of McHaffie's Over My Dead Body, the situation of this mother quite successfully conveys just how complex the ethics of organ donation are.

At the centre of the book is Elvira, who dies in a car accident along with one of her two daughters. This state of affairs, already difficult in itself, is made all the more complex by the fact that she’d put herself on the organ donor register, much to the surprise, and initial dismay, of her parents. The tale successfully allows McHaffie to include all sorts of perspectives on the theme of organ donation; the characters she creates are all vital to the edifying abilities of the novel. Organ donation nurse Sarah’s innate compulsion to create order out of chaos is put to the test by Elvira’s unyielding mother, who doesn’t want to live with the knowledge of parts of her daughter moving around. The wait for Elvira’s parents’ acceptance of her decision places boyfriend Oliver in a 'time warp', sustained by the continued oxygenation of his now-deceased-partner’s body.

One is at times placed in the mind of a grieving mother, questioning the anecdotally transmitted notion of cellular memory, wondering if her daughter’s innermost secrets might live on in her viscera, and entertaining the thought of all sorts of transplant trivia. One is allowed to see the process of organ transplantation through the eyes of a surgeon who enjoys the thrill of giving new life and hope to a patient, by giving him/her the coveted liver, kidneys, eyes. One is brought to empathise with the professional who, with the official aim of securing the smooth process of organ donation, still finds herself at loss of what to do when faced with the very real fears and woes of those who were with the donor in life. And several times, one reads the letters written by organ recipients, who thank her family for its compliance, and stress just how much good has come out of the tragedy.

Over My Dead Body offers very good illustrations of some of the challenges of organ donation, from the suitability of deeming a recipient worthy of a new organ, to the scary possibility of donor registration influencing the determination of brain death, to the legislative issue of selecting an opt-out system for getting people on the donor register. For those who feature Over My Dead Body in their book club discussions or medical ethics classes, McHaffie’s work of fiction is concluded with a number of thought-provoking questions. However, with or without the list of questions to guide the mind, the book is bound to make its readers ask themselves a number of things. More importantly, it will have them face the dearth of absolute answers.

For an added twist to the topic of organ donation, read My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult.

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