April is "Donate Life Month," and you may have heard ads point out that about 96,000 Americans currently are on lists awaiting organ transplants. It may surprise you that nearly 22 percent of these individuals are Californians. While the reasons for this apparent imbalance are complex, the implications are a matter of life and death. Experience suggests a third of these people will die waiting for transplants that never come.
Transplantation in California today is the proverbial "good news, bad news" scenario. Success rates at the best centers in the state are among the country's highest, and I am amazed at how quickly today's recipients are out of the hospital following surgery.
 Steve Okonek |
Novel surgeries, such as a domino operation on a woman I know, led to her donating her own heart to another man, and subsequently receiving a new heart and lungs from a deceased donor, thereby saving a second life. Age is no longer the limitation it once was, as evidenced by a living kidney donation between two 78-year-old people, who are both doing well.
On the other hand, the waits for organs have become extremely long, especially here. For example, when I received my first liver transplant for an autoimmune condition 14 years ago, the six-month wait was slightly longer than average for a person who was still working and not bedridden. That is almost unheard of today, with two- to three-year waits for livers quite common.
The results pose a stark choice of very long waits or going elsewhere for treatment. I now frequently meet recipients who went to other states for transplants and a few who went abroad at their own expense. While the structure of wait lists in this country differs depending on the organ - kidney transplants, which represent nearly three times the number of all other organ transplants combined, are nearly always based on time on wait lists, and livers are based on formulas assessing degree of liver failure - the steady increase in donors is being overwhelmed by an even faster increase in demand.
California is one state that now offers a donor registry to officially record your willingness to be a donor. Make it a point to visit www.donatelifecalifornia.org and learn more about organ, eye and tissue donation and what it can mean for the thousands of people awaiting a transplant. Please consider registering today. If you are already a registered donor, encourage a friend or family member.
Think that one more registration won't make a difference? Just one more donor can save up to eight lives through organ donation or enhance the lives of as many as 50 people through tissue donation. These are people like you. These are people waiting to breathe effortlessly through healthy lungs. These are people dealing with the daily discomfort of dialysis treatments or people worried they won't live another day without a new heart or liver. And think of the thousands who could benefit from eye and tissue donation. Such transplants restore movement to crippled or injured limbs, help soldiers recover from burn wounds, prevent amputation and literally bring eyesight to the blind.
Please register today.
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Half Moon Bay resident Steve Okonek is the current president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Transplant Recipients International Organization. For more information, visit www.bayareatrio.org.
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