Become an Organ Donor

Everyone should become an organ donor. Many lives could be improved with the organs from your body.  Giving the gift of life to someone is a rewarding act of generosity. My 18 year old brother is going to need a heart transplant and I pray there will be a heart available when he needs it.

            Many people that are sick cannot get organ transplants because there are not enough donors. In 2012 “more than 105,000 people in the U.S. were waiting for an organ” and many of these people will die before an organ donor is available. In some countries there are laws that do not require consent for organ donations. Countries having no consent laws are doing a lot to help improve the availability of organs for transplant.

            Do not waste a perfectly good organ. Russell Schofield was an avid skateboarder and snowboarder. He was in a car wreck that left him “brain dead”. The hospital told Russell’s parents he was a “perfect candidate to be an organ donor”.  Luckily, his parents “decided to say yes” and “changed the lives of several people”. If more people were like them, there would be fewer people on wait lists for organs. Russell’s mother says, “The act of compassion at a moment of devastating loss evolved into the realization that lives were saved” and it was a “positive experience”. It helped to “move through grief in ways never anticipated” (McClellan16).  

Tina P. Schwartz, author of Organ Transplants, asserts that the replacing of a “diseased heart with a healthy donor heart” will in most cases allow the person receiving the new heart to “go back to a regular life” and the best news of all is it “even allows a person to play sports in many cases” which is impressive news, especially for people like my brother that love sports.

The Mayo Clinic urges people to not allow “misinformation” to prevent you from “saving lives”.  Some people fear the hospital staff will not try to save their life if they are a donor.  This is not true, since doctors focus on doing everything to save life and do not even think about a donor unless someone is already classified as being brain dead. It is also a myth that the body will not be viewable if there is an open casket. Funeral arrangements are the same whether you are an organ donor or not.  It is also a myth that the family will have to pay more medical bills if organs are donated.  The cost to remove the organ goes to the person that will receive it.

            When someone you love dies, knowing their organs helped save the life of someone is helpful to the grieving process. According to the Mayo Clinic, the donation of organs after death can “save or improve as many as 50 lives”. Sign up to be an organ donor now at www.donatelifecalifornia.org or if you are taking the DMV test, do it then. Perhaps the organs you or a loved one donates could be the heart that saves my brother’s life. Having a brother who will someday need a transplant, I know the importance of becoming an organ donor.