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ICU and You  ·  Superpuzzle Series  ·  Number 46

Organ donation

Fifteen clues  ·  companion to Mind Map #29 and Aphorism #33

What these puzzles are for

The crossword is a pretext. Twenty clues is not a syllabus and nobody learns intensive care from a grid. What a puzzle does well is hold your attention on a word for a few seconds longer than a list would, and put a fact beside it while you are looking.

So the clues are deliberately mixed. Some are practice points you should already know and may not have thought about lately. Some are pieces of physiology. Some are history — a person, a case, a year — because knowing where a thing came from makes it stick. One or two are simply odd, and those are in here on purpose: curiosity is the thing that makes the rest of it go in.

Several clues teach rather than test: you will see the answer immediately and learn something getting there. That is the intention, not a failure of construction.

There is a printable version if you would rather do it on paper, and a challenge at the foot of the page.

Fifteen clues on donation — the must-knows, a little history, and the odd quirk. One is a surgeon in Cape Town, one is a colour shared with a cricket team, and one is a fluid named after a university.

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0 of 83 squares filled

On a phone, scroll the grid sideways. Arrow keys move; typing a letter moves you on; backspace steps back.

Printable version  →

Across

  • 1National register where every Australian can record a donation decision (initials)
  • 5The kind of ischaemia measured in minutes, at body temperature, critical in DCD
  • 7Antigen system matched between donor and recipient (initials)
  • 9Drug given to the donor to control diabetes insipidus
  • 11Performed the first successful kidney transplant in 1954, between identical twins; later a Nobel laureate
  • 12___ perfusion: pumping oxygenated fluid through an organ rather than icing it
  • 14Immunosuppressant discovered in a soil fungus that transformed transplantation in the 1980s
  • 15Fluid named for the university of this US state is used for flushing and preserving donor abdominal organs — liver, kidney, pancreas. Home of the Packers

Down

  • 2The “___ donor rule” — the ethical line that donation must not cause death
  • 3For the pupillary criteria of brain death diagnosis, the pupils need not be dilated, but they must be this
  • 4Surgeon who performed the first human heart transplant, Cape Town, 1967
  • 6Colour of the DonateLife logo; also the colour of the Sydney Sixers cricket team
  • 8Technique keeping a retrieved organ perfused in transit — “heart in a ___”
  • 10Country leading the world in donation rates, with an opt-out system and a national transplant organisation; also won the Football World Cup
  • 13Mixed ___: coexisting donor and host marrow that can free a recipient from anti-rejection drugs

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Finish it, or get as far as you get — partial sets are welcome and are how I find out which clue was unfair.

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