Carey On... The Sound of the Organ
Last week I played my bagpipes at the funeral of a former Scots Guard, distinctly a privilege for me, but the whole time I was thinking about a gal who lived in my dorm at West Virginia U. She’d found one of my hardcover books on eBay and wanted an autograph for her 6-year-old boy. By coincidence, she phoned me just before this funeral.
Flattery quickly turned tragic. She wanted the autograph because she’s on dialysis for kidney failure and she doesn’t expect to live much longer. She’s hoping for a transplant, but time’s running out. She wants my book to be part of the “legacy” she leaves for her son.
I barely got through the call. I wanted to cut out my own kidney and push it through the phone to her.
Of course, life isn’t that simple.
As I played Amazing Grace at the graveside, I wondered whether we were burying a treasure with that man. Did he have healthy kidneys?
I didn’t ask how he passed. Was it a car accident, maybe? Something that might leave a healthy kidney or a heart, a pancreas or liver? Maybe give my dorm-mate ten or fifteen years to raise her little boy?
I may need a transplant some day myself. I have keratoconus in my eyes. I’m not a candidate for corrective surgery and may need new corneas. I have to conquer my natural squeamishness. I’m hoping, when my time comes, that the family of a deceased donor can conquer theirs.
But it’s hard. It’s tortuous to look into the eyes of someone you love and think of maybe donating those eyes. We want the temple of the body to remain intact even after death. We want to hold the memory of the beloved lost, and imagine they’re in one piece for eternity. We’re made that way—it’s part of protecting the ones we love. It’s why we hug each other.
Friends, we have to get over it. Sixteen people a day die in America waiting for organs. That’s 5840 people a year, while each year we bury thousands after thousands of healthy organs because we can’t push through our grief to say, “Take them. Help somebody.”
While checking on this, I discovered “Project Organ Donor.” They have a plan for an “insurance-like policy or tax credit of $10,000 to be given to the beneficiary of any person who agrees to donate his or her organs” in case of brain-death, accident, or illness. It doesn’t apply to living donors, so there’s no “market” in live organs.
Yikes. Pay for donated organs? It hits a nerve.
Yet . . . let’s put aside our quite reasonable “yikes” for a minute. When an organ is donated, a lot of people get paid. The doctors, the nurses, the hospitals, the drug companies, the funeral parlor, the company who made the coffin, the organ currier, the other doctors, the anesthesiologist . . . everybody gets something, except the donor’s family. There are financial incentives for all but the ones giving the most.
If I die suddenly, I’d like to know my family could get some financial ease. I have to be realistic--the embalmer takes the organs out anyway.
But who would pay?
According to “How to Fix the Organ Donation Crisis” by Richard M. DeVos, who received a heart transplant in 1997, “each patient taken off the kidney waiting list saves between $200,000 and $400,000.” Insurance sources would be thrilled to pay $10,000 to the recipient’s family.
Rather than a ghoulish deal, this would be a barter among angels. Save money, save a lives, lower the cost of health care and insurance . . . it’s a win-win-win-win.
My mother-in-law went through this. When Grandpa died suddenly, a young doctor hedged around a question, until Mom looked right at him and said, “You’re trying to ask about organ donation, aren’t you?”
She boldly allowed anything “useful” to be taken. It was one of the bravest things I’d seen in my life. She set an example for me. I’ll follow it if I have to.
I know my husband’s dad would’ve been thrilled to leave a few thousand extra dollars for her. He’d have signed up for that in a flash.
Incentives for organ donation can work. Check on the “LifeSharers” plan and the United Network for Organ Sharing by contacting the Mackinac Center for Public Policy at www.mackinac.org/4175.