I Hate Dialysis Message Board
Dialysis Discussion => Dialysis: General Discussion => Topic started by: GuyIncognito on September 27, 2007, 01:31:26 PM
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This topic is for all the Canucks out there on transplant waiting lists.
Now I know the waiting lists vary from province to province & hospital to hospital but I think we can all agree that the list has become criminally long and I for one am absolutely disgusted with our plight being over looked by the Federal and Provincial Gov. They funnel money into wait time guarantees for knee surgery and the like and yet every year more and more people die while waiting for a kidney.
As I lost my pre-emptive transplant to a bacterial infection which came about from improperly serialized equipment each and every day waiting for the past five years has drove me almost to madness, not to mention the fact that I now have a 1 year old daughter.
What are your feelings on this??
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what is there that you really can do,it's totally out of your control,pull yourself up off the ground and start again,make sure all the t's are crossed i's dotted.hope for the best next time round.
if it's within your control, you do your darndest to see that it goes right,otherwise your at the mercy of strangers at the end of the day
keep punching :boxing; :bow;
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It ain't a lot better in America either. I have been getting the run around for awhile now.
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Transplant waiting lists in most countries are 'silting up,' due to the exponentially increasing number of people on dialysis and the stagnant number of organ donations, which has been frozen at about the same level for the past decade. The only countries that don't face this problem are those with rational organ procurement plans, such as Austria, Belgium, and Spain which presumptively take all organs for transplant from every medically suitable corpse unless the person has registered an objection with the health authorities in advance; or such as Iran and the Philippines which permit people to buy a kidney for donation from a young, healthy person who wants the money more than a supernummary kidney. Even a small step, such as the government paying relatives for donating the organs of a deceased family member for enough money to pay for the funeral, or at the very least, denying relatives the legal right which they now have to override the expressed and recorded wishes of the deceased to donate his organs, would help enormously.
Canada, for all its self-congratulatory image of itself as a more communitarian, caring nation than others, has the lowest organ donation rate of any industrialized country. This means that the average wait for a kidney in Canada is now 8 years and rising, in contrast to less than half that time for most areas of the United States. Several factors make the situation even worse in Canada than the low donation rate requires. First, too few hospitals, especially in rural areas, have the necessary life support machines to keep the heart and lungs of a brain dead person functioning so that a medically usable kideny can be retrieved from it. Many donated organs go to waste because of this. Second, while other countries have long since decided to permit paired donations, in which family members whose blood types don't match can pair with matching blood type members of other families, so that matching kidneys can be traded from one family to another, the Canadian Medical Association is still not sure, in its infinite arrogance, whether it finds this ethical or not. They have been officially studying whether they will permit this life saving procedure now for the last ten years, but because they enjoy playing God so much, they have not yet reached a consensus to permit the peasants to save their lives by this means. Also, hospital transplant coordinators in Canada do not approve even of altruistic donations from emotionally non-related donors, since they choose to set their own mere suspicions that such donations are really organ purchases above the right of their dialysis patients to live.
The only thing to do is to try to get these foolish restrictions changed by arousing the outrage of the public. A few years ago there was a man who had found an altruistic donor in India who was willing to donate a kidney to him, since the person needing one was a famous hero of the struggle of Ethopian and Sudanese Jews a generation ago against the oppression of their governments. When his hospital turned down this life-saving option, saying that in their opinion it would be unethical, the patient went public and made a gigantic fuss about how unfair and unreasonable this was. What should happen, but a few WEEKS later, despite the usual 8 year wait for a kidney, "a perfect match" showed up for this patient in the Quebec cadaver transplant supply, and voila, all that disturbing publicity was gone and the hospital could breathe a sigh of relief. Wasn't that lucky?
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I have taken my ill father to the emerg more that a few times. The last time I took him was the first time he was asked about anything to do with donation or even to resuscitate or not to. I thought it was great and just hope that they are asking everybody and not just him because he is old. Can't imagine what they could use but..at least they asked.