...and the goose is getting fat

My Christmas wish list is short this year. I'll bet you are guessing I would want those lungs to come my way soon, aren't you? And on the one hand I certainly do. On the flip side, that would mean that some other family's Holiday would be tragic. I cannot balance my own good luck against someone else's despair so I'm hoping for something other.

One person has already given me what I want for Christmas. But I'm greedy. I want it from everybody. That person, who shall remain nameless, wrote to tell me that she hadn't given much thought to transplant before. Oh, she'd thought about me, and she knew my struggles and my triumphs through the last set of lungs. But she just hadn't thought about herself and transplant and what it meant to her or anyone else.

In everyday life it seems quite healthy to not ponder our cornea doing double duty when we are finished with it. It would be morbid to dwell on how some piece of tissue we are currently taking to the gym to keep in shape could work just as well for someone else who has lost theirs in a fire. Likewise, lungs...hard to envisage them doing the heavy lifting in another's circulatory system. Its science fiction thinking. Not the stuff of day to day reality...or is it?

It is most of all our hearts we hate to think of 'giving away'. After all we have pledged our heart to our belief system, broken our heart at the loss of a loved one, opened it to a friend, cried our heart out over the loss of a pet, or a job or the end of an old movie. We keep our heart close to us. And we like it that way.

But my Christmas gift from my friend was just that. She spent a little time thinking about all of her 'bits and pieces' and she decided that giving them away when she was good and through with them was OK with her. She signed her donor card and told her family. She signed it for me. She gave me her heart literally and figuratively.

Best Christmas present I ever got!

The thing is, if we give it away, we get it back..big time.

I have met a family here in Toronto who had a daugher, Vicki. She was involved in a terrible accident years ago. And her family insisted that as much of her daugher's body be used for organ replacement as was possible...an act of generosity in a time of dire stress. This was many years ago. Amber's Mom still, these years later, holds an annual party. The flock of people, children now adults with children of their own, all come because they live on with some part of Amber assisting them and making life for each of them possible.

All organ donation is now anonymous and for good reason but it reminds me that surrender is a kind of total freedom and that we cannot lose ourselves by sharing with others. Maybe it's easier if you think of helping just one other person. What if years from now a person in your spectrum of life needed a heart, a lung a kidney. Wouldn't you hope that it would be available? It will only be available if, right now, when there is no such need for it, everyone who can, signs their donor card and tells their family. Signing alone is not good enough. Families have to know your wishes. Hard? Darn hard. Now? No time like the present... and family is gathered for the holiday. Why not approach it as a family?

Please give me what I want for Christmas. Sign a donor organ card and tell your family of your wishes.

You may find you have given the greatest gift to yourself.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone.

Sandra

How to make your wishes known? First tell your family. Second sign a donors' card and carry it in your wallet Download Donor Cards from Trillium Gift of Life Network Also when you renew your health card be sure to ask them to record your wishes on it
Download Donor Cards from OrganDonor.Gov