I love Japan. As a child, I loved its scenery, food and the cute toys. As an English teacher there after college, I loved its clean streets, work ethic and its generous people. My Japanese mother and grandmother taught me to speak the language and to incorporate being Japanese into my identity.
But one thing I struggled to understand was the resistance to one of modern medicine’s greatest miracles: organ transplantation. As an industrialized nation, Japan has the lowest rate of organ donation in the world.
In 1972, shortly after my twin sister, Isabel Yuriko, and I were born in Los Angeles, we were diagnosed with a genetic disease called cystic fibrosis (CF), which creates an abundance of thick mucus in the lungs and pancreas, leading to malnutrition, pneumonia and lung damage.
Our Japanese mother and German father were both unknowing carriers of the CF gene. One in 25 people of white background is a silent carrier of the CF gene, but it is very rare in Asians. My parents were told that we would be lucky to live 10 years. They were trained to give us daily medications to aid digestion and to administer nebulizer treatments — mist through a breathing machine — several times a day so we could breathe easier. Most challenging was the physical therapy they had to provide three times daily: My sister and I would lie over their laps, and they would pound our chests with their hands to help loosen the thick mucus in our lungs.
Read more: http://hyphenmagazine.com/magazine/issue-25-generation/power-two
{Register to be an organ,eye and tissue donor. To learn how, www.donatelife.net or www.organdonor.gov}
No comments:
Post a Comment