Each year, about 400,000 Americans with kidney disorders undergo regular dialysis — a costly and time-consuming procedure — to remain alive.
Ideally, these people would receive kidney transplants so they wouldn’t have to spend hours each week tethered to a dialysis machine, but the demand for donated organs in the United States far outweighs the supply. (According to the PBS NewsHour, the wait for a kidney in America averages three to five years.)
Why, you might ask? In part, because many Americans just aren’t aware of how important it is to register as a potential organ donor. Add that to the fact that the topic of organ donation makes some people squeamish and unwilling to discuss it with loved ones.
But a series of new programs in Australia might provide a model for how to promote organ donation in the United States. Australia’s recent interventions have increased the rate of donation to the highest it’s been in 25 years. What’s the secret from Down Under?
Yael Cass, the CEO of the Organ and Tissue Authority told Sara James of the PBS NewsHour, “The key thing that we’ve done is that we’ve picked best practice from around the globe.”
Those include raising public awareness of the problem through media campaigns and offering paid leave from work from living donors. Additionally, the Australian government reimburses employers for the time donors take off to recuperate.
Australia also trained 600 health professionals in important techniques related to organ donation — such as how to broach the topic of donation with grieving families. They also created a kidney donation database that registers and compares the stats of the chronically ill waiting for kidneys with those of potential donors.
These efforts have increased the rates of donation in Australia by 60 percent over the last four years, Cass said.
The policies made the difference in Rosemary Wehbe deciding to become a donor for her brother. She didn’t want to lose income from her work as a photography teacher in Sydney, but because of the reimbursement program, she didn’t have to worry about that. Her brother, Simon, told James, “What is it like to feel like someone saved your life? I owe her my life, really.”
Let’s hope that the U.S. considers adopting some of these pro-donation policies and that more lives are saved as a result.
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Tag: organ donation
Why This Fearless Teacher Risked Her Life for Her Special Needs Students
Tricia Moses lives and breathes for teaching, so there’s no greater irony than the fact that an extremely rare autoimmune disease destroyed her lungs and nearly took her life.
The Brooklyn teacher, diagnosed with Scleroderma in 2009, was in urgent need of a double lung transplant after the incurable disease turned her lungs into scar tissue. Ever the fearless and devoted teacher, Moses went against doctors orders so she could see her third grade special needs class through state exams, as Yahoo Shine reports.
“We’d been preparing for the exams for so long,” Moses, a teacher of 14 years, told Yahoo. “Even though my students have special needs, they’re still held to the same standards as everyone else unfortunately. We’d worked so hard. I said please just give me another week, and then another week, and then another week. I wanted them to have a fair chance to succeed.”
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The 39-year-old, who teaches at P.S. 233 in Flatbush, is the epitome of selflessness by putting her own life in danger for the well-being of her students. While still working, her health got so bad she had to be placed on oxygen 24 hours a day, and she was so weak that she needed her students to help her get around.
Miraculously, as the New York Daily News reports, Moses was able to see her students through their exams on April 23 before flying to a hospital in Pittsburgh to receive her new lungs in an arduous eight-hour procedure. According to the publication, Moses is recovering but she is in danger of organ rejection — her body has already turned on her new lungs twice, sending her to the hospital both times.
She also faces a mountain of medical bills. While Moses’s insurance mostly covered the $900,000 transplant procedure, she is using her own money to pay for doctors’ visits and medication. To help with the costs, her loved ones plan to host a fundraiser in June.
Now in rehabilitation, the elementary school teacher has been instructed to stay in Pittsburgh to be near her doctors, but she’s already awaiting her return home to New York next January so she can go back to what she does best. She even told Yahoo that she wouldn’t hesitate to do it all over again.
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“They’re children with special needs, I didn’t consider it to be the job,” Moses said. “It was something I wanted to do. I wanted to be around them, and I had so much faith in them. I knew if I left them and they had a substitute teacher, it might not have gone as well. I knew that I needed to be there with them.”
Looks like we can all breathe a little easier now that this heroic teacher is on the road to recovery.
The Spirit of This Amazing College Student Lives On After Her Life Is Cut Short
She never rode in a hot air balloon. Or flew a plane. And she didn’t travel around the world. So while Chico State nursing student Kristina Chesterman wasn’t able to fulfill all the wishes on her high school bucket list because an alleged drunk driver cut her life short last September, she did check off a major item — saving a life.
In fact, the late 21-year-old Californian didn’t just save one life. She saved five. As the Huffington Post reports, that’s because Chesterman chose to be an organ donor, giving the chance of life to others — including 64-year-old Susan Vieira.
According to KRCR-TV, Viera suffered from congestive heart failure and could have died if she hadn’t received the young woman’s heart. She now vows to live out Chesterman’s unachieved life dreams after she recovers from the transplant. Viera told the ABC affiliate that “Kristina’s waiting there to advise me.”
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According to the San Jose Mercury News, other organ recipients include two babies who received portions of Chesterman’s liver and a family friend who received a kidney.
The newspaper adds that besides the gift of life, the young organ donor inspired her university to start the Kristina Chesterman Memorial Nursing Scholarship, which has already raised more than $30,000. Her fellow nursing students are also reportedly raising money to build a clinic in Nigeria that will be in her name.
In the United States, the demand for organ donations vastly exceeds the number of donors. As we previously reported, while 90 percent of Americans approve of organ donation, only 42.7 percent have signed up to do so. Because of the discrepancy, nearly 7,000 Americans die waiting for organs each year, roughly 18 per day.
Sure, we might not like to think about what happens to our bodies after we die, but it’s inspiring stories like Kristina Chesterman’s that demonstrates how being a donor is not just a generous decision, it truly is a life-saving act.