Pictured are representatives of Gift of Life Michigan and members of Lakeland HealthCare hospital staff and organ transplant specialists who took part in the first ever organ donation to take place at Lakeland Hospital in Niles last year.
By JESSICA SIEFF
Niles Daily Star
Across the nation, countless lives hang in the balance, waiting for a second chance at life – the chance to be a recipient of an organ donation.
For donors, their difference begins in the signing of their name, then added to a registry.
It ends in the hospital.
From determining whether or not patients coming into the hospital could be potential donors to matching those donors to their recipients, gently guiding families through either process and ultimately saving a patient’s life, doctors and specialists play an integral part in the organ donation process.
“We have to identify potential candidates,” said Maureen Bishop, registered nurse and clinical nurse specialist for Lakeland HealthCare. “Then we have to, by law, notify Gift of Life within an hour to these patients criteria. They send someone down and they evaluate the patient (for) whether they are a potential donor or not.”
There is particular criterion patients must meet to be evaluated as a potential donor.
Bishop said that criteria includes life being supported by a mechanical ventilator, sustaining some sort of neurological injury and progressing to either brain death or what she calls a “newer type of protocol, donation after cardiac death.”
“Those patients that are, again, on a ventilator have had some kind of catastrophic neurological injury,” Bishop said. Those who fit the criteria of donation following cardiac death, she said, “will not reach brain death but their injuries are such that we think pretty definitely that … if we take them off the ventilator they will die within an hour. These are our national standards that we go by.”
Though death can sometimes sound clinical, doctors, nurses and staff understand the emotional weight resting on the shoulders of the donors’ families.
If a patient is determined to be a donor, the family is given the appropriate time before they are approached to discuss donation – and when that happens, it’s done by Gift of Life, Bishop said, not the hospital.
“Hospitals have a choice,” she said. Where facilities would train requesters to discuss the issue with families, she said, “it takes a lot, especially for a smaller facility like ours to keep those requesters available.”
In utilizing Gift of Life, families are presented with two sides to what could be a heartbreaking choice.
Bishop said the hospital’s choice not to request the donation helps as the families “don’t feel like we’re the ones giving up.
“It really helps to make a sort of division or a separateness,” she said. “Between the people who are caring for the patient, the traumatic time and the organization signing up donors.”
Once the choice is made and patient becomes a donor, time is of the essence.
“You’ve got to empathize with the families and what they’re going through and allow them time to absorb the information that their family member is not going to survive before we even bring in Gift of Life,” Bishop said.
Still, in the case of whole organs, such as the heart or lungs, there is a very delicate time frame as to how long those organs will be viable.
Gift of Life helps take care of the patient’s course, Bishop said, as they start working on tissue typing and “offering organs to the transplant centers.”
Lakeland Hospital in Niles isn’t a transplant center but performed its first donation last year.
Through Gift of Life, should a transplant be needed, a team of specialists can be organized, dispatched to the hospital to perform the surgery.
Bishop said the team that performed Niles first procedure of its kind was brought in from out of state.
And, she added, it’s important for patients to know they can be put on the waiting list at multiple nearby facilities, such as the University of Chicago or University of Michigan, so long as they are able to make it to that facility should an organ become available.
“There’s a lot of new technology and a lot of new research that’s been done that we tend to work with patients a little bit longer,” she said. “There’s a lot of treatment we can provide to make their organs stronger.”
Still, donation is critical. Even with technological advancements, “It’s not going to regenerate (those organs),” Bishop said. “It’s not going to bring them back to life.”
It could, however, give patients time.
“There’s a potential for one donor to help up to 50 people,” Bishop said.
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