YOU HAVE THE POWER TO SAVE LIVES. PLEDGE AND REGISTER TODAY

Follow us to learn more about organ donation and our national efforts to raise awareness about the critical need for donated organs. We are finding inspiration in unexpected places.

BECAUSE ORGAN & TISSUE DONATION MATTERS

There are over 113,000 Americans waiting for a life-saving transplant. Registering takes only a few minutes. Please encourage your family, friends and colleagues to pledge the "gift of life" by signing up at your State's donor registry. Click HERE to learn how. Californians, please visit Donate Life California.

Our Pledge Life Memorial, "Celebrate Life...Remembrance". We are pledging to HONOR, remember and celebrate the lives of donors, transplant recipients, donation and transplant community members. Will you PLEDGE with us to do the same?
DL Life Logo April 27,2012 - - - - 113,953 AMERICANS ARE CANDIDATES ON THE UNOS TRANSPLANT WAIT LIST DL Life Logo 91,996 waiting for a kidney DL Life Logo 16,098 waiting for a liver DL Life Logo 1,269 waiting for a pancreasDL Life Logo 2,153 waiting for a Kidney-PancreasDL Life Logo 3,172 waiting for a heartDL Life Logo 1,632 waiting for a lungDL Life Logo 52 waiting for a heart-lungDL Life Logo 278 waiting for small bowelDL Life Logo One organ donor has the opportunity to save up to 8 lives DL Life Logo One tissue donor has the opportunity to save and -or enhance the lives of 50 or more individuals DL Life Logo You have the power to SAVE Lives by becoming an organ, eye and tissue donor, so what are you waiting for? To learn how to register click HEREDL Life Logo

Monday, February 20, 2012

Health Matters: Living Organ Donors

NBC 2, WBBH News for Ft Meyers

FORT MYERS, FL -Arlene McKen-Sutherland was in dire need of a kidney. She spent four grueling years on dialysis before finding a match last year. It came after several false starts.

"I was called a couple times before that, ‘oh there's a match, there's a match' and I'd get all excited and then they'd be like ‘oh sorry, kidney was no good' or something went wrong."

It can be a heart-wrenching process. Prospective kidney recipients wait nationally three to five years for a kidney. The average time locally is 20 months. A key part of the process is finding a suitable match.

"Kidneys require a slightly closer match than any of the other organs. So when a donor becomes available, regardless of how long someone's been on the list, the blood type certainly has to be identical; be a match but then antibody screening has to be done to make sure that it's an appropriate match," says Barbara Miller, Director of Kidney Transplant for Lee Memorial Health System.

0 COMMENTS: