We have a liver selection meeting every Wednesday to consider which patients will get transplants. Each patient is listed by name, age, weight, diagnosis and MELD score — a number, based entirely on lab values, that predicts how bad their liver is and correlates with how likely they are to die waiting for a transplant.
Joshua Mezrich is an associate professor of surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He is author of “When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon.”