Shots of John and Anita in hospital. Anita in bed/hospital personnel/ medical machinery | John: I've got all the photographs and that. They were the happy times. You know, the happy memories of places that we went to, the things that we did. What you're looking at here, she's very debilitated, she's had chronic - she's been doing dialysis twice a week for a year. And she was hating every minute of it. And prior to that she was a sportswoman she was active, she was going places in business and she was rally quite a strong person and I that think it really just knocked the stuffing out of her in more ways that one - physically and mentally.
| 01.00.03 |
Map of South East Asia. Thailand and Bangkok highlighted. Shots of John in publishing office. John talking to co-worker | Williams: John Twigg is a New Zealander running a monthly magazine on Bangkok's lifestyle and nightlife.
| 01.00.41 |
| FX: Conversation
| 01.00.50 |
John in office | Williams: It's a business he started three years ago with his Thai girlfriend.
| 01:01:00 |
stills pictures of Anita and John | Anita was a young, vivacious banker, going places fast. But just before the magazine was launched, her long-standing kidney disease turned critical, and she quickly needed a transplant.
| 01.01.05 |
John and Williams walking in a garden | Williams : In Thailand they could not find a donor nor a doctor to could help
| 01.01.20 |
John and Evan Williams | John: We tried for a long time to have an operation here. There'd been a few false starts, where we'd basically - and Thailand has a very bad system, whereby - well there's no centralised system of organ donor...
| 01:01:26 |
Williams and John on couch in front of video machine. Shots of Anita in hospital/ hospital surgery on video. | Williams: That sent them on a search for a new life-saving kidney, a search they allowed a friend to video.
| 01:01:42 |
| John: And we thought why not? What he was looking for was footage of how the whole thing happens, and if you like, a nice tidy little documentary on organ donning. And he knew the contacts and that, and so it worked very well.
| 01.01.53 |
Shots street in India/ Anita and John in car/Indian scenes | Williams: With time running out, the place to go was India, the only country where Anita and John could buy a kidney.
| 01:02:21 |
Streets in India | Indian music
| 01.02.30 |
Shots Indian street life/Williams driving car up to clinic building | Williams: Ahmedabad, a teeming city on the edge of India's dry central plains.
| 01:02.38 |
Shots Indian street life | Indian music
| 01.02.43 |
| Williams: An industrial powerhouse, many of its people are however, trapped in poverty. That means there are plenty willing to sell their organs for money to make ends meet.
| 01.01.49 |
| Williams: It's also home to India's biggest kidney clinic. And it was to here John and Anita turned for help.
| 01.03.09 |
Williams in clinic with Dr. Hargovind | Williams: Hello, doctor. Thanks very much for seeing us.
| 01.03.15 |
| Williams: Founder and director, Dr. Hargovind Trivedi, is India's leading transplant surgeon. He says they took on Anita's case as a medical challenge and as an humanitarian gesture. | 01.03.23 |
Dr. Trivedi and Williams | Trivedi: She was a high risk patient. And therefore they didn't - people were afraid of transplanting her, at all levels, because she had very blood vessels and she did not have access. It was an unusual case to transplant. And therefore we were in it because we are in the habit of doing unusual and extraordinary things. Unfortunately, we got trapped into a multiple complications which we ran into one after another.
| 01.03.33 |
Shots interior hospital room. John sits by Anita's bedside as staff attend to her. Anita on operating table/medical personal | John: The first thing they did was check her into a room, get her comfortable, then take her down for dialysis. This was that first dialysis.
| 01.04.06 |
| Williams: It was also going to be one of her last. Anita's arteries were drying up.
| 01.04.16 |
| John: You can see they were actually coming into the vein in the neck. That's a main trunk artery and it's going in there is a sure hit. It's sort of like going into the biggest artery you can find. They'd run out of small arteries.
| 01.04.22 |
John/shots of Ahmedabad streets, people, defunct factories. | Williams: It was time to act. And Ahmedabad is a good place to find a kidney. It's part of India's industrial heartland. Home of the some of the country's first ever textile mills, more than a century ago. But India's recent trade liberalisation has opened the country to cheap imports. And that sent many of the older inefficient mills to the wall, forcing thousands of breadwinners out of work.
| 01.04.35 |
| Williams: In suburbs like this, many of those former mill workers have been left unemployed, with big bills and bigger families to feed. In Ahmedabad, many have turned to selling their organs simply to survive.
| 01.05.06 |
Williams enters house and greets Indian family/shots family and house interior | Williams: At 45, Shantilal Naralal is one of those former mill workers left with no job and a big family. In these overcrowded suburbs, his is a common story. He makes some money selling gas from the back of his bicycle. But he just made six months of his former factory wage selling his kidney.
| 01.05.26 |
Naralal | Naralal: Now I can take a hard-earned rest and watch my son take over my work moving three or four gas cylinders a day. It's good to sit back now and watch my son do it. | 01.05.49 |
Teja sits at side of cot surrounded by wife and daughter. | Williams: With the help of officials at the clinic, Anita found a seller too. Teja Singh was also once a mill worker, sacked with thousands of others when the firm shut down. He agreed to sell his kidney to Anita, to pay for his daughter's future.
| 01.06.10 |
Singh | Singh: Look, it's like this-today my daughter is thirteen years old, in five years she'll be eighteen. We will deposit 20 to 25 thousand rupees in a fixed term deposit and in five years time it will be doubled. Then I don't have to worry about the expenses for her marriage.
| 01.06.28 |
Shots operating theatre/kidney removal | Williams: His kidney was removed and cleaned in an operation Dr. Trivedi's clinic does twice a day.
| 01.06.56 |
| Kidney's are best taken from relatives. But new drugs, especially cyclosporene, have dramatically reduced the chance of bodies rejecting organs from non-relatives.
| 01.07.05 |
Shots John and nurse at Anita's' bedside/Anita | John was confident Teja's kidney would end Anita's suffering, and give her a new chance at her once active life.
| 01.07.18 |
| Anita: They say it's easier than giving birth
| 01.07.28 |
Anita in bed/Anita and John in hospital/Anita on stretcher/shots of operation | Williams: But strangely, she felt something was wrong.
| 01.07.32 |
| John: This is one of the things that haunts me a little bit, was that she was more pensive, or more worried about it than I was. And I was - I sort of had taken the doctors at their word, and here we were for a walk in the park, and she was sort of a little bit more concerned about the possible outcomes of it.
| 01.07.36 |
Doctor examines Anita
|
| 01.08.00 |
Anita in bed/Anita drinking from coconut | Williams: After the operation, there was of course, the normal pain.
| 01.08.04 |
| Anita: It hurts when I get up.
| 01.08.08 |
| Williams: The initial outcome was generally good. She started to eat and look better.
| 01.08.10 |
| John: Anita's first food?
| 01.08.17 |
| Anita: It's a bit bland.
|
|
John in surgical clothes/John and Anita in hospital/scar on Anita's' stomach | Williams: John's optimism seemed well placed.
| 01.08.23 |
| John: Hello, Mum.
| 01.08.26. |
| John: That was very naive of me. And I think Anita had a much more realistic view of the fact that this was a potentially very dangerous operation.
| 01.08.27 |
Anita lying in bed moaning/medical personnel/John helping Anita sit up | Williams: After a few days, those dangers started emerging.
| 01.08.50 |
| Anita started getting complications. As soon as she recovered from one problem, something else would emerge.
| 01.08.58 |
Anita being given pink medicine to drink/medical notes/Anita receiving medical treatment | John: There was always this underlying question you know what's the danger of this operation and basically the answer was - thanks to cyclosporen - there is none. But as we find out later actually she was allergic to cyclosporene, which was one of the key things, I guess, to why this one didn't work.
| 01.09.21 |
Anita's suffering in bed | Williams: Taken off the drug that was crucial for her body to accept a stranger's kidney, Anita's condition worsened.
| 01.09.45 |
| Williams: As the kidney started to fail, toxins built up in her body. She quickly became critical.
| 01.09.55 |
Doctor examines Anita's legs/Anita in bed/ | Doctor: Where does it hurt you? You are in pain? Where does it hurt you?
| 01.10.07 |
| Anita: All over. Doctor: All around. All over?
| 01.10.16 |
Shots heart monitor/ Anita in operating room attended by nurses and doctors FX: Hospital machines
| Williams : Just before the emergency John had gone back to Bangkok to launch their magazine | 01.10.22 |
John and Williams | John : Within 24 hours after I'd left they'd checked her in to ICU and the only criticism I have with the whole operation was that I was not informed at the time she was taken in to ICU because if I had been informed I could have gotten on the plane. It's one of those things...
| 01.10.27 |
Nurse on the telephone | Williams : Getting off the plane in Bangkok he immediately called the hospital.
| 01.10.48 |
hospital/ Anita | John: ...and I got this blank message, like you'd better talk to the doctor and so if you like there is a premonition of problems. And so when I did talk to the doctor and he told me it was like a real kick between the eyes because I hadn't seen it coming at all really.
| 01.10.52 |
Hospital/doctors | Williams: Finally overcome by the complications, Anita slipped into a coma.
| 01.11.19 |
Anita on bed. Doctor pulls back her eyelids/doctor tries to resuscitate Anita/ | Doctor: Anita, open your eyes.
| 11:11.24 |
| Williams: Doctors tried what they could, but it was too late.
| 01.11.31 |
| Despite emergency attempts, she died of heart failure.
| 01.11.39 |
Picture of Anita surrounded by flowers/funeral procession/John at funeral/coffin in furnace | John: This is the difficulty in losing somebody unexpectedly, is that there's always things you should have done or you could have done. So that was, if you like, that's all history now. It was very unexpected even until the time I've left. The other thing it actually taught me was not to be so withdrawn and holding things inside you, and sort of like tell people how you feel.
| 01.11.47 |
Williams and Trivedi in Indian clinic with patient/Trivedi at work | Williams: Dr. Trivedi's renown was the main reason John and Anita came here. Dr. Trivedi: This is the patient.
| 01.12.19 |
| Williams: But it was also because they could buy a kidney, a practice banned almost everywhere else. Since then, Trivedi has convinced India's parliament to make organ sales illegal here too. And for the first time, allow the use of organs from the brain dead.
| 01.12.30 |
Dr. Trivedi | Trivedi: And we have been pushing for the last three years, to curb the commercialisation, bring in cadaver transplantation, so automatically kidneys are available very easily.
| 01.12.47 |
Dr. Trivedi/William and doctors walk through clinic/patients in clinic | Williams: Since March, two years after Anita's death, it's been illegal to buy organs here. Doctors face up to seven years jail for performing the operation. But these kidney patients are discovering what John and A already knew... to save their life people will do anything.. Even in Trivedi's own wards, we discovered the trade continues to flourish.
| 01.13.00 |
Williams at bedside of patient. Shots patients family/Williams | Praveen Bhai needs a new kidney. His wife has offered hers. But he prefers to buy one from someone else, even though he knows it's illegal.
| 01.13.28 |
Praveen Bhai | Bhai: I think it's better to spend some money to buy a kidney because you know, I value my wife's life. She's precious to our children. If the doctors say there really is really no risk to her life then we could think about it-but if there's any trace of danger we will buy from the market.
| 01.13.38 |
Shots clinic/patients | Williams: And, he told us, hospital administrators run the clinics' now illegal trade.
| 01.14.08 |
| Bhai: The doctors here keep a list of available donors. If there's a donor, we can get one. Bhai: A kidney operation costs 200,000 rupees. ($A9,000)
| 01.14.13 |
Dr. Trivedi/Williams | Williams: Even Dr. Trivedi admits the trade is hard to stop.
| 01.14.23 |
Dr. Trivedi | Trivedi: It will be, as I say, as long as people to sell, people want to buy. Every time we make some laws the people got around it and made some ways out of it. But obviously the open system's growing uninhibited, more and more people being recruited into the systems. More and more people being benefited. It has to be stopped.
| 01.14.27 |
Shots people giving blood | Williams: This is one of those recruitment methods. A benign looking Rotary Club blood donation drive in an average suburb. But the register of blood donors is used by agents and doctors as a list of potential organ sellers. First they're approached to sell blood. Then they're asked if they want to part with their kidneys for cash.
| 01.14.57 |
Shots woman in red Sari and man at young mans bedside/Woman serving food | She knows it's banned, but after weeks of waiting for a match, Mrs. Jayashri Janni, bought a kidney illegally for her son, Nikunj. They did not go through a broker, but people seemed so ready to sell their kidneys, the family found someone by themselves.
| 01.15.22 |
Janni/ Doctor checks patients pulse/Janni | Janni: The doctors found that none of the relatives matched-then this man said he was willing to do it.
| 01.15.40 |
| Interpreter: How much did it cost?
| 01.15.50 |
| Janni: We gave the donor 20,000 rupees. Interpreter: How much did it cost all up? Janni: For the operation we paid a total of about 175,000 rupees.
| 01.15.52
|
Shots doctor with patients | Williams: Most of that money went to middlemen and the hospital. Money often used by the clinic to pay for operations the poor cannot afford.
| 01.16.05 |
Shots street scenes/Salim and Williams in car | But there is a darker side to the trade.
| 01.16.14 |
| Through the underground network of buyers and sellers, we found one of those middlemen.
| 01.16.20 |
Salim Bai in car | Salim Bai is a street wise agent for human organs, a middleman between those who need an illegal kidney and those willing to sell.
| 01.16.26 |
Bai in car | Bai: These are all blood sellers-they hand around here. They come from all over the country.
| 01.16.38 |
Shots men sitting on pavement | Williams: These men are selling their last hope. Drained of blood every few days, for a few dollars. Eventually many turn to selling their kidneys.
| 01.16.46 |
Bai | Bai: In these households only one person works and four or five people feed off this measly income. You sell a kidney to get money for a sister's wedding-you sell when you've had no work for days. That's how they fell into this trap. First they start by selling blood and eventually they call on agents who deal in kidneys.
| 01.16.57 |
Shots people dancing on street/faces in crowd | music Williams: On the same streets, these slum dwellers are praying for wealth. As the monsoon breaks over India, they hope dancing to the goddess of rain will bring them prosperity.
John: From our point of view, it's a necessity to get a kidney, and if you can't get one - I mean, I actually think...
| 01.17.31 |
John and Williams | John:...personally I think it's better that you are - to me it's the sort of thing that you should be paying for. And Dr. Trivedi had a nice way of putting it, whereby those that can afford it, are paying for those that can't.
| 01.17.54 |
Shots Ahmedabad/people | Williams: In Ahmedabad's organ trade, desperation brought John and Anita together with India's poor. And despite the new laws, the need to live, on both sides, is reason enough for the trade to continue.
| 01.18.07 |