After reading “Is it time to make organ donation compulsory” in Monday’s Crikey I thought I would share my experiences with readers.
Three years ago this month, when I was 32, I was diagnosed with very high blood pressure in my lungs and severe heart failure, attributed to congenital heart disease. I was quickly placed on the waiting list for a heart and double lung transplant with the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, and am still waiting. In the meantime I get by with an oxygen machine or portable oxygen bottle and some medication, although my health is deteriorating. While a transplant isn’t a cure it will hopefully give a better quality, and longer, life.
I would like to make the point that a donor who saves several ill patients is most likely also directly saving several of the patients’ dependents. In my case I have two dependents, my wife and young son, as I have managed to keep working and in fact am the sole income earner. If I get a transplant then my dependents benefit as well, and if I don’t then it will be devastating for all concerned.
While I have accepted the status quo of the system and waited for the life-changing phone call, I have really become sick of waiting. There just aren’t enough organs. There have never been any calls late at night for me. Not only do I wonder how the Doctors generally balance my need for a transplant with other patients on the waiting list, but also how difficult it would be to judge whether I should get a set of organs that could instead potentially help three individual patients if the organs were divided up into a heart and two single lungs.
I feel like it isn’t my place to ask for our society to have a better system for organ donation, a system that can deliver up many more organs. The half-hearted discussions on organ donation we have here, and the media attention the issue gets which focuses on recipients and life-saving donors rather than those waiting and the death-toll, implies I should be grateful donors exist at all. But the status quo is not delivering results, and if this continues then the status quo will kill me and break my family. Australia needs a radical change to the organ donation system, and a compulsory opt-out system is a commonsense, common good, solution. Why can’t we have a compulsory opt-out system here?
Well said! With Spain having a successful program in place, and UK about to go down that path, Australia would do well to follow suit. Let’s change the media focus to those on the waiting list, and the death toll.
Certainly a tragic case. But does the end justify the means? Personally I think not.By all means ask anyone getting ,say a driver’s license to consider organ donation coupled with literature explaining the issue.
TIm (& his family) deserve better. I support an opt-out system like Spain’s. Families overiding potential donors’ intentions to donate is unsupportable.
My partner of 14 years died in Sydney in 1996 waiting for the same operation Tim needs. We miss her.
Agree re opt-out. The most valuable organs will be from those young healthy people not anticipating to die, unlike older people like me who have filled in all the forms – but whose organs are not likely to be of much use to anyone.
There are several countries that have legislated that all citizens are organ donors unless they request to be listed otherwise. Some of those countries put those so listed at the end of the line as recipients of organ transplants.