Who Will Live?

Who Will Live? is inspired by a true story. Seattle, 1961. Charlotte Bellamy, a 25-year-old, childless teacher, discovers at a doctor’s visit, that she has a potentially serious kidney disease. At the same time, kidney specialists at the University of Washington are preparing to open the world’s first dialysis center to treat chronic kidney failure. Their problem is they can only treat five patients, though hundreds need it. They create an admissions committee to choose who will be the lucky five to survive kidney failure. When Charlotte returns to her doctor for her follow-up visit, she learns her kidneys are failing, and that there is no treatment. It’s a death sentence. After she has recovered from this shock, she decides she’s not giving up, that there must be something that can be done. She gets her husband, a professor at the University, to take her to the medical school library so she can research treatment for her disease. She learns there is none. She sees a kidney specialist who reaches the same conclusion. She is devastated, realizing she really is going to die. Then the dialysis center sends out notice to kidney specialists that they are recruiting patients for their new treatment. Her doctor excitedly reaches out to her to share the news. Now she just has to overcome the odds facing the committee. After first being turned down, letters from her second grade students convince the committee she should be one of the lucky five. But before she can start, she collapses in full blown kidney and heart failure, and is rushed to the hospital where she is saved with emergency dialysis. After she recovers from that crisis, she begins her chronic dialysis. Though she is now feeling back to normal, she learns that the other four patients are parents with multiple children. As a young child, Charlotte traumatically lost her father, and now she realizes that when she was selected for dialysis, it meant a parent was being sent home to die. She realizes she can’t inflict the pain she experienced on other children, so she decides to discontinue her dialysis, dooming herself to a painful death.