Tell you
what, folks: I’m angry today.
The source of my anger
is actually a New York Times story about some monumentally wonderful people.
A pair of women in Minneapolis underwent incredibly severe surgery to remove
parts of their lungs.
The catch? Neither
one had anything wrong with them. Quite the opposite: they were totally
healthy.
These women are what
the medical profession calls “live donors.” They each donated half a lung,
and those partial organs were transplanted into a third woman, a 31-year-old
dying of cystic fibrosis. Both the donors will have reduced lung capacity,
but the recipient will have functional, if somewhat small, lungs.
These women are a paragon
of selflessness. Right up there with the family members who donate a kidney
or part of a liver to a family member, they are giving up part of themselves
and subjecting themselves to possible medical problems forever.
Even more surprising:
there were 5,500 of these angels last year. One liver donor actually died
from the procedure. Nearly half the lung donors at Barnes-Jewish Hospital
in St. Louis had complications, some of them quite major, following the
donations.
Hallmark just doesn’t
make a card for that.
So why am I angry?
Because these women needed to be live donors in the first place.
Here’s some statistics
from the United Network of Organ Sharing, a nonprofit organization that
maintains the national waiting list under contract with the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services.
As of June 16, the
number of patients waiting on the UNOS list for transplants was 76,932.
Guess how many donors
were found in 2000? Only 11,589. Of those, nearly half were living donors
like the Minneapolis women. In 1999, 6,143 people died waiting for organs.
This was the largest number of deaths since 1990.
I did a story on organ
donation a couple of years ago. I interviewed a man who lost his lungs
to cigarettes and received the lungs of a healthy 20-year-old man who had
crashed his car and lingered on life support until his family made the
hard choice. Now the recipient is incredibly healthy and told me that although
he felt he didn’t deserve the gift of the lungs, he tries to be worthy
of it.
But what astounded
me with that story was a statistic offered by the Regional Organ Bank of
Illinois: 300 people died in Illinois waiting for organs in 1998. That
same year, 327 families were approached about organ donation when a relative
was brain-dead - and refused. They chose instead to let the organs go into
the ground and rot, and 300 people died.
Nationwide, according
to ROBI, 50,000 people qualified as donors at the time of their deaths
in 1998, and fully two-thirds of their families refused to donate.
The organ shortages
in the United States are so severe that we now have to turn to living Samaritans
to find donor organs.
This issue is further
clouded by the ongoing obsession with organ-donor storylines on television.
My favorite soap opera went through one last week: a character was shot
in the head, and at least the doctors went through the tissue-typing and
apnea tests before pushing the husband to sign the forms.
But in all these stories,
from “All My Children” to “ER,” you see the doctors treating the poor,
dying girl upstairs rush downstairs to the site of the poor gunshot victim,
stand by the bedside and push the family into signing the forms.
That doesn’t happen.
Transplant surgeons are not involved with the donor’s care at any level.
Only when the patient has failed all brain-activity tests - EEG, reflex,
apnea, etc. - is the patient declared brain-dead. There’s no one pushing
to shut off the machines so the heart can be hauled upstairs. Quite often,
the donor and recipient are at different hospitals, even different states.
I find it disgusting
that we allow healthy organs to be incinerated or embalmed when thousands
of people are dying waiting for those organs. It’s a song we hear all the
time - there’s a zillion commercials reminding people to check ORGAN DONOR
on their driver’s licenses. But then the families step in, and prejudice
and stupidity and plain old grief intervene, and another person dies.
I have the deepest
sympathy for those who have lost a loved one, especially in an accident
or other grievous trauma that comes suddenly. Certainly it's been on my
mind lately, with the death of my grandfather and the near-death of my
mother in the same week. Yet I know that their strongest wish would be
that if necessary, they could give life after their own deaths.
And it’s not only organ
donation. No one in the history of the world has died from donating blood.
Yet how many actually do? The blood banks remain half-empty most of the
year, and nearly dry in the winter, as we all do our Christmas shopping
and forget to donate blood and people crash their cars in the winter snow
and bleed to death.
So I’m angry that those
two Minneapolis women have to breathe with difficulty for the rest of their
lives, when one family - just one - could have saved the life of that woman
and made their incredible sacrifice unnecessary. Perhaps if we didn’t have
these special rules that keep the donors and the recipients separate, it
would be easier. Perhaps if it went like my soap opera, where the donor’s
husband could look into the suffering eyes of a dying woman and see how
tragedy could save a life, some of those lives could be saved.
Perhaps. But selfishness
extends beyond death, and I have seen nothing in the numbers that gives
me hope.
For the record, when
I croak, anything they find that still works can go to help anyone who
needs it. For those who duck the question - “I gave at the office” - shame
on you. |
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