OPIOIDS AND ORGANS

A grieving daughter considers profund inequities in medical practice.

Are you an organ donor? Some make sure their affirmative answer is noted on their driver’s license, while others maintain religious or ethical objections with the intention of keeping their deceased body intact. O’Neill’s debut graphic novel engages with this modern medical phenomenon from a deeply personal perspective. When her father became brain-dead after a fentanyl overdose, she writes, medical professionals aggressively pursued her permission to donate his organs. In ruminative grief, O’Neill views this experience with a cynical eye—the Canadian medical establishment has no real impetus to curb the country’s opioid crisis, she argues, as overdose deaths offer them a substantial quantity of organs available for transplant. Circling slowly around this painful realization, O’Neill turns her gaze to historical examples of ethically problematic treatment of disenfranchised bodies in pursuit of medical progress. Her exploration soon becomes something of a grand tour. She ponders the people once attached to organs displayed at Montreal’s Maude Abbott Medical Museum. She visits Marsh’s Library in Dublin to research gruesome dog-mutilating experiments undertaken by Vladimir Demikhov, the “father” of heart transplant surgery. In Harvard Medical School’s hallowed halls, she considers the early American slave cadaver trade and the rushed medical decisions that facilitated the United States’ first heart transplant. Finally, she heads deep into the Parisian catacombs to make some sort of tenuous peace with mortality and the fleeting wonder of embodied existence. Along for the haunting, haunted excursion are a snarky lizard symbolic of O’Neill’s “anxiety…obsession…compulsions” and Frankenstein’s monster—a rather handsome fellow whose sadness mirrors Arizona’s own. O’Neill’s illustrations, presented in muted hues and speckled with surreal visions of disembodied organs, are detailed, airy, and eerily elegant.

A polemic critique and engaging journey through grief, at once raw and poised.