My Sister's Keeper

At my mom's club book club session tonight we had a great conversation about My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult.

It's about a couple who finds out that their 3 year old daughter has cancer, and on the advice and help of their doctor to implant the perfect embryo, they decide to have another child so they can get a perfect match of cord blood to save her. The story takes place 13 years later, as Anna, the second daughter, tired of being the child who exists to save the first, refuses her fourth major medical procedure: donating a kidney to save her sister.

There are many other plot twists, but the critical questions came through very starkly:

• Can you ever love your children equally?
• How do you balance the interests of one child with another in the same family?
• As a mom, or a dad, how dedicated and obsessed should you be with saving your dying child?
• Is it ethically right to conceive and grow a child with the thought of organ and tissue donation?

The family in the novel was an extreme look at these issues, involving a court case to allow the 13 year old to wrest medical power of attorney from her parents (which she won), a pyromaniac older brother trying to get attention from his firefighter father, and a big, big lie that is revealed at the end of the story. We were all quite disgusted with the mother of the story, who was truly dismissive of her other two children in the guise of saving just one. She decided she had to be in control of saving her daughter herself by giving birth - misplaced heroism as one Mom insightfully pointed out. But the issues about balance, ethics, and genomics were very real.

We had two nurses and one pediatric nutritionist in the group. They had lots of very interesting stories to share abuot real families and how they deal with sick children. It turns out the latest thing is training parents to deal not just with their sick kids but their whole families. It's common for the sick children to be infantilized, spoiled, and developmentally behind their peers, and for the other kids to become quite troubled as well.

And no one could answer my question about whether they'd consider having a child to save a child. Everyone seemed to be saying, I don't want to be like that mother, but it would really depend on the situation, wouldn't it? What if that were the only thing you could do to save your child? I found this both understandable and quite frightening.