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The Guest The next set of magnets is from the fridge of my brother-in-law and his wife.
* NEW * Someone suggested I add a discussion board, so I have. If you have anything to discuss, go to this link. Feel free to start a new discussion on anything. I'm gone--but you guys chat amongst yourselves, please! WHAT I'M READING... by I enjoyed his Australia book so much, I decided to try the one about this country. WHAT I'M WATCHING... Scattering Dad That's it for today!
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HAVE A HEART 29 May 2001 It’s time for another "IF" Collaboration. This month’s topic is: If someone close
to you was in For me this is a no brainer. I remember back to a night in May of 1996 when we were standing in an apartment in New York, and I was listening incredulously to the words coming from the other side of the country through the telephone held to my ear. "Mom? Dave’s been in an accident. He’s not going to make it." Your world kind of stops spinning. Everything becomes unreal. You talk to the kids who are there at the hospital, you try to reach out and be there, but you’re 3,000 miles away. And as the reality begins to sink in...one thought keeps popping up: organ donation. I know that this is often a touchy subject for transplant teams. How do you approach a grieving family, about to lose a loved one, and ask if you can "harvest" the usable organs. Even the word is difficult to say. "Harvest." Like a farmer sitting on a tractor digging up vegetables from the back 40. But I remembered back to my sister’s death. Of course organ transplant had not been pioneered in those days, but corneal transplants had been and they asked if we wanted to donate her corneas. My mother wanted to, my father didn’t Nobody was going to cut up his daughter. And so she went to her grave with her intact corneas and my mother and I have thought over the years of the people whose sight might have been restored had they been given Karen’s eyes. They harvested whatever they could take of David. And we received a note telling us who had received his organs. A year later we learned that they were all still functioning perfectly. Little pieces of David, especially his wonderful heart, living on in other bodies. We found it very comforting. We had buried the shell that held his spirit, but parts of him were still walking around, leading normal lives, and able to give love to the people who loved the shells they’d been put in. It was a big disappointment when Paul died that we could not donate his organs. Since the circumstances his death were in question he became a coroner’s case and thus they could not save any of the organs. They were able to take cartilege and some other stuff, but major organs, no. It saddens me to think that we might have saved someone’s life with a heart or a lung that Paul was no longer using, but we had to let them go. As for donating an organ when you are still up and walking around, I can’t think of a better, more loving gift to give someone. I think about all the people waiting and hoping that somehow an organ will come along in time. I think about one of those people being someone I love a lot and thinking that the thing that would make the difference is donating an organ that I can live without. What would be my choices? Donating the organ, or watching someone I loved die. If I could have donated an organ that would have saved either Paul or David, there wouldn’t have been any deliberation required. Modern science has progressed so far that it’s just wonderful that we have the technological ability to put new organs in failing bodies. I can’t imagine anybody who would rather watched a loved one die than give up a healthy organ they could easily live without. Take my kidney. Please. One
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Created 5/29/01 by Bev Sykes |
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