Organ donation is important. It could have saved my cousin

He passed away in January, before getting new lungs

The first time I heard about organ donation was on Grey’s Anatomy, when Denny needed a new heart, and everyone at the hospital was losing their minds trying to get him one. Naturally, I was pretty invested in the show, and so I was losing my mind along with them. I don’t mind telling you that I wept buckets of tears when he got his heart only to die a few hours later of an embolism.

But that’s TV, and this is real life, so I promptly forgot all about it a few days after the episode aired. I didn’t think about it again until I was 18, and my mother told me that one of her cousins had been diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), an auto immune degenerative disease with no known causes or cures. He’d been put on a transplant list for a new set of lungs.

I’d met him only a few times before, but I was still extremely upset; it’s not an easy thing to know that one of your relatives, even one you’re not particularly close to, is suffering from a life-threatening disease. Unfortunately, he passed away in January, before getting new lungs.

Here’s the thing about organ donation; it’s not as easy as one might think to get a new set of lungs, or a heart, or kidneys, or a liver. In fact, it’s damn near impossible. You see, one needs to register to become an organ donor – in the US, it’s listed on your driver’s license. If one is declared brain-dead, and has not registered as an organ donor, the doctors cannot touch their organs, even if they are viable, without the family’s consent. And in so many cases, the families don’t give consent; grieving parents and spouses often don’t want to consider ‘eviscerating’ a loved one so soon after their demise. In many cases, religion is a factor; Shintoism in Japan, for example, forbids injuring a dead body, as it is considered impure.

In March, an NYU student was killed in a snow-storm after contracting a lung infection, but his organs were donated to patients in need all around the United States. To me, this the most tangible sign of life after death – that even after one is gone, they live on through the several people they saved my donating their organs.

I’ll be taking my driving test over the summer, and I will register as an organ donor if and when I get my license, and I urge you all to do the same. Should, God forbid, anything happen to me, I can take comfort in knowing that my eyes will give sight to someone who’s never seen a sunset, my heart will go to someone whose life has been in danger every time their heart beats faster when they’re nervous, my skin will go to someone been afraid to look in a mirror after a terrible accident, and my blood will go to someone who’s never known what it’s like to feel truly warm.

And you know what? Heaven’s got nothing on that.

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