Last summer I went to my local Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my driver’s license. When it was my turn after a half-hour wait, a woman behind the counter summoned me, muttered a greeting and began shuffling through my papers.
After a few minutes she broke the silence and asked, “Do you want to be an organ donor?”
As a surgeon specializing in liver transplants, I’ve spent more time than most people thinking about that question. But on that particular afternoon, after a long wait on hard benches in a spartan room with a dozen others gazing glassy-eyed into space, a question about death and the dispersal of body parts felt as if it had come from out of the blue. Or from the script of a bad existential play.
It took me a minute to collect my thoughts and agree, but the experience reminded me why there are not enough organs available for transplant in the United States and why only half of all Americans consent on their driver’s licenses to organ donation. It’s hard to think about dying anywhere. It’s particularly difficult in the middle of the D.M.V.
Unfortunately, there are significant repercussions to those decisions. More than 100,000 patients are currently on the transplant waiting list, and about 7,000 of them die each year because of the organ shortage. Even more dire is the situation of African-American patients, who have a higher incidence of diseases that can result in kidney failure. These patients make up almost a third of the waiting list but account for only about 15 percent of those who donate after death. Even though organ allocation does not take race or ethnicity into account, the chances of a “good match” are increased within groups with genetic similarities.
Read more: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/using-a-d-m-v-wait-to-enroll-organ-donors/
{Register to be an organ,eye and tissue donor. To learn how, www.donatelife.net or www.organdonor.gov}
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