How ‘General Hospital’ Missed a Chance to Promote Living Organ Donation

In the 60+ years that it’s been on the air, the daytime ABC drama “General Hospital” has brought attention to an array of social and medical issues, including HIV/AIDS, bipolar disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and substance abuse.

But rather than raising awareness, a recent storyline on the long-running program may have sowed seeds of doubt about living donor liver transplants. This saga started back in August, when the powers that be at “General Hospital” announced that the character Sam McCall, played by Kelly Monaco, was being written off, after appearing on the show since 2003.

It’s not unusual on soap operas for a person to be presumed dead — the body never found — allowing producers the option to bring back that character in the future. But in this case, there was no coming back. Sam volunteered to donate part of her liver to save Lulu (who just happened to be the comatose ex-wife of Sam’s romantic partner, Dante), and the surgery went well for both patients. Later, in the hospital, Dante proposed to Sam and gave her an engagement ring. But then, in a scene soon after, alarms started ringing. Something had gone horribly wrong. Viewers see the harrowing efforts of doctors and nurses who tried in vain to save Sam before she succumbed to cardiac arrest.

In an episode 3 weeks later, the autopsy results came in, revealing that Sam had died of an overdose of digitalis, which had not been prescribed. At first, it was thought that someone on the medical team made a terrible mistake. But fans on social media correctly predicted it was murder: a flashback scene in a recent episode found one of the show’s bad guys sneaking into Sam’s room while she slept and injecting digitalis into her I.V.

The trouble is, this scenario wasted an opportunity to open viewers’ eyes to an amazing feat of science, medicine, and bravery. The show could have better explained and put a spotlight on what happens when a compassionate person offers a portion of their liver to a family member, friend, or stranger.

For many Americans, their only experience with organ donation is when they check a box at the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles], allowing their driver’s license to read “donor.” While the majority of organ transplants come from deceased people, living donor liver transplants are a remarkable way to help someone survive. The surgery, which was pioneered in the 1980s, involves removing a diseased liver from a sick patient and replacing it with a portion of a liver from a healthy, heavily screened donor. Because the liver is the only organ in the human body that can regenerate, this means that the livers of both the donor and the recipient can grow into complete organs in a matter of months.

The traditional medical journey of receiving a liver from a deceased donor can take years, because there simply are not enough available livers. At any given time, some 10,000 people in the U.S. are on the waiting list for a new liver. The sad truth is that the longer the wait, the more a patient may deteriorate, eventually becoming too ill for transplant surgery.

According to University of California-San Francisco Health, “Having a living donor not only reduces the waiting time until transplant, it improves the chance for transplant success. Patients who receive transplants from living donors can better prepare for their surgery, knowing well in advance when the transplant will take place. Also, the liver itself is ‘fresher’ because the donor and recipient are in nearby operating rooms and the donated liver portion is transported within minutes.”

Of course, every surgery has possible complications, but the risk of death for a living liver donor in the U.S. is less than 0.2%. (To put this in perspective, according to the National Safety Council, an American’s lifetime odds of dying in a car crash are higher, at approximately 0.9%.)

On “General Hospital,” there have been a lot of ways that characters have been killed, such as by car bomb, shooting, strangling, stabbing, or being poked with a poisoned hook. Couldn’t the writers have figured out another context for Sam — a daredevil private investigator — to disappear? Maybe while working on a dangerous case?

Even though the transplant surgery was a success (so “General Hospital,” thankfully, didn’t kill her off as a direct result of the surgery), Sam’s death after the operation created a cloud of negativity about the procedure and about healthcare more broadly. What impact might this bleak sendoff have on people contemplating becoming donors? The writers could have instead leaned into the transplant experience by giving a cameo to an actual living organ donor — someone like Cara Heuser, MD, a maternal fetal medicine physician at Intermountain Health, who stepped up twice, first in 2020 to be a living liver donor and then again in 2023 to donate one of her kidneys.

If you think a misguided storyline doesn’t matter, consider that “General Hospital” averages almost 2 million viewers each week. What a shame that the show missed a chance to teach about a unique way to save a life.

Emily Dwass is the author of Diagnosis Female: How Medical Bias Endangers Women’s Health.