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A teenage girl crosses a border for a chance at life—and loses it to a mistake so basic it should have been impossible. We dive into the case of Jesica Santillán, the 17-year-old who received an incompatible heart-lung transplant, and trace how a single missed safeguard exposed cracks across donor services, hospital protocols, and communication chains. This isn’t a story about rare complications or experimental risk; it’s about the simplest check in medicine—blood type matching—and how failing it changed transplant safety nationwide.

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Resources: 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anatomy-of-a-mistake-04-09-2003/ 

https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMp030033?download=true 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25077248/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesica_Santillan 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3528375?read-now=1&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents 

https://www.wral.com/10-years-later-questions-surround-jesica-s-hope-chest-charity/12997462/ 

https://corporate.dukehealth.org/news/duke-releases-letter-unos-concerning-jesica-santillan 

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/us/girl-in-transplant-mix-up-dies-after-two-weeks.html 

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