How Steve Jobs Got Sick, Got Better, And Decided To save lots of Some Lives [Steve Jobs]

Yesterday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a bill that may make California the first state inside the nation to create a live donor registry for kidney transplants.

The bill also requires California drivers to make your mind up whether they wish to be organ donors once they renew their drivers’ licenses. In line with one notable supporter, this second measure alone should double the number of organ transplants available in California.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs attended yesterday’s ceremonial signing of the bill at Packard Children’s Hospital near Stanford.

This was fitting, because despite the law’s near universal support, the information behind the bill had languished for years on the desk of Senator Elaine Alquist .

The truth is, the postulate of a registry for living kidney donors only gained enough political support from Alquist’s Senate colleagues and the Governor to make it into a formal bill this past March due to Steve Jobs’s efforts.

More specifically, the law exists due to Steve Jobs’s illness last year and the large, expensive effort it took for him to seek out a liver donor.

In the summer of 2008, Steve Jobs appeared on stage at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center to introduce the most recent version of the iPhone. Observers were shocked at Steve’s emaciated appearance. Steve looked so bad, that, not eager to be within the business of mocking a dying man, Dan Lyons soon quit writing his satirical blog Fake Steve Jobs.

Apple PR tried to tell reporters that Steve caught a ” common bug” and that he’d regain his weight soon.

But he didn’t.  In December 2008, Steve shocked the media and worried friends by announcing that he doesn’t deliver Apple’s keynote at the imminent 2009 Macworld Convention . Apple again tried to indicate Steve’s health had nothing to do with the problem, but two weeks into the most recent year, the company and the CEO announced he could be taking a leave of absence that will manage a ” hormone imbalance.”

Here’s what was really happening: Steve Jobs’s liver was failing and he was learning that he needed to exchange it otherwise he would die.

Around this time, Steve began in search of a new liver. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the sole one doing so in California. Actually, over 3,400 Californians were expecting a new liver in 2009. Only 671 got one. 400 died.

What Steve probably did next, inside the weeks between January and March, was what most wealthy Americans with failing livers do inside the same situation: travel around america and pay big fees to be examined by various doctors at various hospitals with the intention to get on as many waiting lists as possible.

This process is known as multiple-listing, and its benefit is that once searching for a patient who needs a liver, hospitals have a look at their own lists before moving on to the national one.

The process is extremely time consuming. One of the crucial hospitals where Steve got listed required an interview with a health care provider, an interview with a social worker, complete medical work including lab tests, an abdominal ultrasound, psychological clearance, a colonoscopy, an EKG, ” and several other tests.”

Of course, anybody who needs an new organ to survive would wade through such a tribulation again and again. Most just can’t afford to . Their insurance companies only cover one listing because getting listed could be very expensive.

By early to mid-March: a miracle. One of the most hospitals at which Steve had gotten listed reached him to claim they’d a liver and that he was the correct candidate to receive it via transplant.

It was Methodist University Hospital in Memphis , Tennessee.

Steve acted fast. In keeping with one source, Steve had the local lawyers at Burch,Porter & Johnson create a limited-liability corporation (LLC) called LCHG LLC and buy the nicest mansion in Memphis’s wealthiest neighborhood on March 17, 2009.

Then, throughout the week of March 22, 2009 Steve underwent surgery. His surgeon was either James D. Eason, M.D or Nosratollah Nezakatgoo, M.D. . The operation probably took five to six hours. The liver came from somebody in their mid-20s who died in a car crash.

Hospitalization from a liver transplant can take several weeks, and it wasn’t until mid-April that Steve felt well enough to go into his new home in Memphis. In step with a source who conducted several interviews, neighbors noticed when he did. They spotted Steve’s wife around town and the safety cameras he had installed in trees surrounding his home. They noticed the guard parked inside the driveway.

Doctors recommend liver transplant patients stay in town for no less than a month after leaving the hospital. And so, between weekly visits to the hospital, Steve stayed at his new home in Memphis. Even though he felt up for it, Steve couldn’t go out much because he had to take immunosuppressive medications to forestall rejection of the recent liver, and this made him more vulnerable to disease. (Not less than the place was nice. It’s listed as a $1.4 million, 7,400 square-foot home, with five bedrooms and five bath rooms.)

By June, Steve had recovered enough that he allowed it to be leaked to the Wall Street Journal that he would return by the tip of the month. On June 20th, the WSJ also got word of Steve’s surgery. In September, Steve was healthy enough to talk at Apple’s annual refresh of its iPod line. Still a little raspy, he told the group about his surgery and his new liver.

By December 2009, Steve Jobs’s life was very like it was before he got sick. Rumors were running wild again and, unlike the year before, and more like several other year in Steve’s life since the launch of the iPod, they were not about his health, but about Apple’s latest gadget.

But something about his whole experience still bothered Steve.

What bothered him was that while he, a extremely wealthy man, was surviving his liver’s failure, others were not so lucky. Specifically, he was upset because, while he was in a position to afford the fees of multiple-listing and an individual jet which can ferry him to any hospital within the country at a moment’s notice, others in California could not; they’d to stay in California and hope. He knew that 400 people died hoping.

And so, in a departure from a largely apolitical career, Steve decided to do something about it.

At a dinner in December – not anyone will tell us where this dinner was – Steve sat next to Maria Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s niece and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife. Steve told her the complete story of his liver transplant. He complained that California doesn’t do enough to encourage people to become organ donors. He told Maria that she should get her husband to do something about it – that California should require those that want drivers’ licenses to claim whether or not they wish to be organ donors (previously, they’d only had the option of exclaiming they wanted to be donors).

The First Lady talked to her husband. Then the Governor called Steve. The Governor called State Senator Alquist, who he knew to be ages advocate for organ donation. Suddenly, a cause that couldn’t find its way into a bill for two or more years was set to become State Senate Bill 1395. All attributable to Steve Jobs – and his now-departed liver.

After his conversation with the Governor, lots happened to distract Steve from his new cause. Mostly, there was the iPad – a gadget that was speculated to save media and replace laptops. The iPad needed announcing and then last-minute perfecting. Things got so busy that in the course of the month before the iPad’s launch, Steve almost skipped an event at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital where he, the Governor, and Senator Alquist were scheduled to announce the bill.

When the Governor’s office contacted Lucile Packard to schedule the event roughly 10 days prior to time, they said that Apple’s famous CEO were invited to look, but that the hospital is not going to include his name within the press release.

Then, five days before the event, Katie Cotton and Nick Ammann from Apple public affairs showed up at the hospital and took a preview of the tour that the Governor and the Apple CEO would take that Friday.

Finally, word came that Steve would show.

Friday came and so did the Governor, his entourage, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs in his characteristic black mock turtle neck and jeans. After an introduction from the hospital’s president, the Governor  stood at the podium. He looked at Steve and said:

It’s great to have Steve Jobs here, who I believe was very instrumental in getting us here today and to have us provide you with this great bill with the intention to change an awful lot here in California. He talked to my wife about his transplant and then my wife talked to me about it and I talked to him about it and we had these great phone conversations backwards and forwards and now here it truly is reality; we are introducing the bill.

And what I really like about Steve is, because he is a wealthy man, we all know that and that helped him get the transplant. But he doesn’t want that, that only wealthy people can get the transplant and have a plane waiting to take him anywhere he should go. He wants every person, when you have no money at all or in the event you’re the richest person on earth, everyone must have the proper to get immediately a transplant. And that is why he has talked to my wife and that is why he has talked to me and put the pressure on us to get this bill going so that we open it up and have enough of the organs available for the whole those who are potential recipients. So we would like to claim – let’s give him an immense, big hand for his great generosity.

That’s when Steve walked to the podium and said the next:

Thank you, Governor Schwarzenegger. Last year I received a liver transplant. I was very fortunate, because many others died waiting to receive one. Last year in California there were 671 liver transplants but last year there were also over 3,400 people looking ahead to a liver and over 400 of them died waiting in California.

I was almost some of the ones that died watching for a liver in California last year. I was receiving great care here at Stanford but there were simply not enough livers in California to head around and my doctors here advised me to sign up for a transplant program in Memphis, Tennessee, where the availability/demand ratio of livers is more favorable than it’s in California here. And I was lucky enough to get a liver in time. On the contrary, this coming week is my one-year anniversary.

So why aren’t there more organs available in California? Because in California, like most other states within the nation, you could specifically request to become an organ donor at the dept of Motorized vehicles once you’re there to get or renew your driver’s license. Nobody asks you with a view to become a donor. And there’s no marketing campaign to make you conscious about this opportunity, either, so unless you learn about it and unless your specifically ask, nobody is going to ask you, nobody is going to offer you this opportunity. And yet despite this obscure procedure over 20 percent of Californians have signed up to be organ donors, that is fantastic. But imagine what it can be if everyone knew of this opportunity.

And that’s what the Governor’s bill will do. This will simply require the DMV to ask you in case you’d desire to become an organ donor. That’s it. Asking this one simple question may double the number of transplant organs available in California – one simple question. And that’s a terribly high return on investment, especially for the over 20,000 Californians currently anticipating an organ transplant.

So Governor, thank you to your leadership on this bill. And now I’d wish to introduce Senator Alquist. Thank you.

There’s reason to believe the event moved Steve Jobs more than he expected it might.

During the preview tour five days prior, a hospital staffer recalls someone from Apple suggesting that they tighten up the tour of the hospital’s kidney transplant area – make it quicker for the busy executives. But at the top of the tour on the actual day of the event, this same hospital staffer says that while everyone else – the Governor’s people, Apple’s people, and the hospital staff – waited outside the recovery room for the kids who had just received organ transplants, ” Steve was still in there chatting with kids.”

” Steve stayed in there for some time, really enjoying himself.”

Business Insider also published a version of this story last spring, when the organ donor law cleared the California state senate’s health committee.

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This post is tagged: Arnold Schwarzenegger, california drivers, california governor arnold, governor arnold schwarzenegger, living kidney donors, macworld convention, worldwide developers conference