National Donate Life Month
Published on Apr 29, 2007 at 12:03 am.
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Well, here it is the end of April. A friend recently told me that April is National Donate Life Month and asked if I’d mind mentioning that in my blog. So, even though it isn’t one of my usual topics of discussion, I am going to mention it because this is an important issue.
The US Health Resources and Services Administration, a branch of the US Department of Health & Human Services, maintains a website called OrganDonor.gov that gives a lot of information about organ and tissue donation. Many organs and tissues can be donated. According to the OrganDonor web site, each day about 19 people die waiting for a donated organ that they need to stay alive.
Now, organ donation doesn’t have to be inconvenient for you at all. After all, you can wait to donate until you are no longer using your organs. Then, you can pass them on to someone else. After all, once you are gone, there is absolutely no discomfort, or even any bother, to you to donate. Some organ and tissue donation can be done while you are still alive, of course, if you wish to do that (such as bone marrow, a piece of a liver, or a kidney). And of course, while not an organ, I should also mention that it is also important to donate blood. And, donating blood can be done relatively easily with little risk or inconvenience to the donor. Organs, though, must be carefully matched between donor and recipient. So, even if there were equal numbers of available organs and recipients, then the probablility is that there would be a number of people who still would not match. That means that there needs to be more organ donors available in order to meet the need for donated organs.
“So,” you might ask, “why are you blogging about organ donation?” Well, I figure that Astroprof’s Page, after all, is a blog, and not just a forum for astronomy news and topics (though that is what I normally talk about). And, it is my blog, so like I said when I first started a blog, I will talk about mostly astronomy and college teaching topics, but I reserve the right to go off on any tangent that I feel like. And this is one of them. And, I’ve actually seen what happens to organ recipients. The friend who asked me to blog about this is an organ recipient herself. In fact, she had to have multiple organs or else she’d have died. And, if she’d had died, I wouldn’t have gotten to know her, and knowing her has been a blessing. But, she isn’t the only person I know who is an organ recipient. One of the professors here at my college also was in pretty bad shape with a failing liver a couple years back, and it looked like he might not make it until a suitable organ became available. Now, he is doing quite well. He is a wonderful guy, and a good professor, and the college would be a poorer place without him. So, that’s two people in just my circle of friends that I can think of right off that have received the gift of life, and I am thankful for those who donated organs, or donated a loved one’s organs, for my friends.
So, even though it is now at the end of the National Donate Life Month, we should remember that organs are needed at all times of the year, not just during April. So, give it some thought.
-Astroprof
