Organ donation is the key thing that makes transplant possible. It’s lifesaving procedure, but we can only offer that when we have organs available for transplant. Organ donation is so important because many people who would benefit from transplant and who are listed in waiting for transplant actually die without ever receiving access to Transpine.
And that’s because there’s a critical shortage of donor organs available. Organ donation is possible as a deceased donor or as a living donor in order to make your wishes known. About organ donation, there are several ways to do it. The most common is to, when you register for your
Driver’s license to check the box. There are other ways to do it, including a national registry where it’s very simple, you can just go onto the website and you can make your wishes known. Living donation is when somebody makes a decision to have surgery on behalf of someone else and they
Donate either their kidney or part of their liver, or in the case of a bone marrow donor, they undergo bone marrow donation. In the case of kidney or liver, most of the time somebody is what we call a directed donation. So they donate directly to their loved one. But sometimes people know
That they want to be an organ donor and they haven’t identified an intended recipient. And in that case, these remarkable individuals simply donate in a non directed way and we select compatible recipient. Organ donation is an extremely altruistic endeavor, living donation in particular, you’re actually stepping forward and
Volunteering to save another person’s life. And that does put your own self at some risk of having a surgery and recovering from a surgery. The most important thing is to make sure you understand what’s involved and know that it’s something that we do a lot and that is remarkably beneficial for
The recipient As having a big surgery, it’s possible to recover very well from that surgery and get back to everything you were doing before you underwent donation. Somebody has questions about living donation. They’re uncertain whether they want to proceed. So we certainly have developed a lot of reading material that could be
Available for people to look through, questions that could be answered over the phone, either with our donor advocate or our donor nurse coordinators. But probably the thing I would recommend would be most helpful is we have the opportunity for our nurses to allow you to speak to someone else
Who’s gone through the process that may help you to get those questions answered. We have this therapy that works really well, but we can’t give it to everybody that needs it. So when organ is available for one of the patients, you know that’s fantastic.
