Reg Green - The Gift That Heals

The Gift That Heals
By Kristen Kancler

Today we have a special treat in honor of National Donate Life Month. Reg Green, author of The Gift that Heals and head of the Nicholas Green Foundation, shares his thoughts on the importance of donating organs. His son, Nicholas, is known as the “worlds most famous organ donor” and 2009 marks the 15th anniversary of his death and of his family’s courageous decision to donate his organs and corneas. Please read on…

A pediatric emergency room is not a place for the squeamish. Children come in who ran in front of a car on the last day of school or fell off a bicycle or drowned while their parents went to answer the doorbell. These are not children who have suffered from a chronic illness where death could have been foreseen. The shock is total.

“The parents hurt so much. Some of them seem to need help just to survive,” says Mindy Zoll, a transplant coordinator with TransLife, the organ procurement organization in central Florida.

Yet these are the parents that some nurse, like Mindy, is going to ask to donate their child’s organs to help complete strangers. It must be one of the most difficult questions in the whole of medicine. But the need is urgent and the supply of organs is very limited so it has to be done.

My seven-year-old son, Nicholas, was shot in a botched robbery in Italy in 1994. My wife and I donated his organs and corneas to seven very sick Italians, four of them teenagers. Almost fifteen years later all seven of them are living productive lives. Having met them all and seen the agony they have gone through and knowing what would have happened to them if we had made a different decision, it’s inconceivable to me that we could have turned our backs on them.

More than 100,000 people in this country are on the waiting list for a transplanted organ. Twenty years ago it was 20,000. It is not that organ donation rates have gone down – there has been an upward trend for years – but as the techniques improve and more and more patients become candidates to receive a transplanted organ so the list grows month by month.

In a real sense, then, transplantation is the victim of its own success. That, however, is no consolation for those 100,000 people, 18 of whom die every day because of the shortage.

Nor is there any magic wand to dramatically increase the supply overnight. In the great majority of deaths, where the heart stops beating, the organs deteriorate too quickly to be of use to anyone else. Most donated organs come from the small number of people whose brain has stopped working – and so are truly dead – but who are on a ventilator that is keeping the blood flowing and the organs viable for a short time.

April is Donate Life Month when the year-round, unremitting push to encourage people to sign donor cards, put their names on state registries and talk to their families goes up another notch. A good starting point for those thinking about what to do is to visit the Donate Life America website.

Being prepared is crucial. A transplant coordinator told me she was on duty one night when a small boy was brought in, dying from a road accident. When brain activity stopped, she took a deep breath and asked the parents if they would donate the organs. They refused — angrily — at what they saw as a crass intrusion on their sacred moments. She said she understood, the bottom had fallen out of their world. But all she could think of was that on the third floor of that same hospital was another little boy who was also dying that night, and did die, because the heart that could have saved him never arrived.

I often think of that family and how close they came to being saved and how, in all probability, they would have been saved if that other family had only had a brief conversation about organ donation months before while death was just a distant concept.

The average decision to donate produces three or four organs as well as tissue such as corneas, skin to cure burns and bone to straighten spines. Anyone faced with the choice then can either save three or four lives and relieve many others of pain or shrug off their problems as none of their concern. With that much at stake, I often wonder what possible debate there can be about what is the right thing to do.

~Reg Green

April is National Donate Life Month, a celebration of the tremendous generosity of those who have saved lives by becoming organ, tissue, marrow, and blood donors.