Medical Review for Organ Transplant

so sad... this shouldn't have happened....

"SEATTLE -- A musician who was denied a liver transplant because he used marijuana with medical approval under Washington state law to ease the symptoms of advanced hepatitis C died Thursday."

First, there should be more donors so people on the waiting list don't die unnecessarily, 2nd, the medical review team nixed his transplant even when using the pain-killing drug (in WA state) is legal! That just doesn't make sense.

Organ donation- selling kidneys

This is an interesting post and 10 min. video on Organ donation and presenting the option of selling kidneys, which is currently illegal. I don't know if this is the right solution, but I know that the waiting list is NOT going down, its going up - over 70,000 people... these people are suffering and dying way too early. Not fair.

Marv Reznik -Rest in Peace

In the Tribune today, an obituary of an acquaintance I met while working at Gift of Hope. Marv was an organ donation advocate who spoke eloquently at many public events GOH hosted and also at in-services I held for nurses and doctors to encourage them to be thinking of donation as an opportunity for helping families to deal with the loss of a loved one. He was the only person I had met who was both a donor family member (his son died in a car accident) AND a recipient of a organ as well. He was a really great guy. Very funny - a wonderful sense of humor. Of course I don't meet that many funeral directors (thank goodness) - but up until that point I had never expected to meet a funeral director with such a great sense of humor. I guess you could say he had a zest for life and it was infectious.

He will be missed tremendously by the local organ donation advocacy/community.

Organ Donation & Stem Cells

Good news on the Organ Donation front today.... Chicago Tribune article by Judith Graham

Yeah for stem cells!

A new transplant technique has enabled five kidney recipients to survive for several years without taking drugs that suppress their immune systems, scientists reported Thursday.

Doctors produced the groundbreaking result by injecting transplant recipients with blood stem cells taken from their donors' bone marrow. The stem cells multiplied and protected the transplanted organ from an immune system attack.

Normally, recipients must follow a lifelong regimen of immunosuppressant drugs for their transplanted organs to survive. Those drugs greatly increase the risk of infections, cancer, high blood pressure and other serious medical problems.

The cost of the drugs is a very expensive component of post-transplant complications, that and the fact that they mess with your system and cause all these complications that can lead to the organ failing and need a new replacement! The cool thing too is that the donor doesn't even need to be a close match to the recipient ( HLA types etc). Soon this could help people already on the list who are waiting for a kidney from a non-living donor because if they did have a potential donor (but they didn't match!) now they might be able to go forward with it. The insurance companies should be all over this because they are going to save a ton of money not having to pay out for all those multiple drug prescriptions that normally would have been necessary to take for the rest of that kidney recipient's life!

I'm going to send this to my friends at Gift of Hope. (BTW the researchers in this study used bone marrow blood stem cells NOT embryonic stem cells.)

Also, if you haven't signed up yet to be an organ donor in your state - DO IT ! (if you live in IL go here: https://www.iamareyou.org/

Data by state & how many people are waiting, and dying (!) because not enough people choose to donate

:~(

http://unos.org/data/about/viewDataReports.asp

Wombs for rent - really!

Creepy Crawlies ... I just had one of those "I had NO idea THIS was happening" moments reading this.... so sad. I think Judith Warner is a really good writer. I loved her last book (Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety) and recommended it to all my friends and bookclub group several years ago. I'll add her to my favorites.

" Because what’s going on in India – where surrogacy is estimated now to be a $445-million-a-year business — feels like a step toward the kind of insane dehumanization that filled the dystopic fantasies of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale.” (One “medical tourism” website, PlanetHospital.com, refers to the Indian surrogate mother as a mere “host.”) Images of pregnant women lying in rows, or sitting lined up, belly after belly, for medical exams look like industrial outsourcing pushed to a nightmarish extreme.

I say “feels like” and “look like” because I can’t quite bring myself to the point of saying “is.” And in this, I think, I am right in the mainstream of American thought on the topic of surrogate motherhood"

Read the Marie Claire article too by Abigail Haworth! I find my predjudice raising against busy mom's-to-be who either forgot or were too busy when they were younger. I think that is different situation than say a woman who has had a hysterectomy early-on because of some medical condition or genetic situation. I think I could understand the overwhelming desire for a child of one's own, but not in the same desperate way I would if for example it was a life-and-death issue, like if you needed a heart or kidney transplant or you are going to die. There are a lot of issues here that relate to BioMedical Ethics. But its also a matter of educating young women ( the premise I think of Judith's book) that you really cannot have everything you want when you want it -especially here in America, Motherhood is just not supported socially by the government -early OR late. So people wait, until they are better off financially. If you want something badly enough, you might have to settle for Mr. Average in your late 20's instead of waiting 15 years for George Clooney to be available when YOU think you are ready in your mid-30's. Or don't have kids at all. Or Adopt when you feel like you'd be "read-ier", but don't wait too long there either or the birth mom's will think you're too old.

On the other hand, those women surrogates in India are really in a bad situation too. Some worse than others. One surrogate in the article was doing this so she could provide a dowry for her daughters to have a good marriage- even though dowries are supposed to be illegal in India! I think women are doing this for both good and bad reasons on both sides -desperation on both sides - to fulfill an economic necessity or a biological desire, or even an expectation of "completeness" of family size.

I can't imagine that I'd ever be that desperate to have my "own" baby. Maybe I would have been... I don't know. That said, from the little I know about adoption, it sounds like there is so much paperwork, money, and time needed for that too. I should ask my neighbor L. about this. She went through in vitro a lot of times. I'm so glad they ended up with S. 13 yrs ago! She's J's best friend. They are the best parents too- I'm so lucky to have them as neighbors!

Gift of Hope

Yesterday was bad news for the organ transplant community. When I saw the headline in the Trib I said "Oh No, Oh NO, oh NO". I used to work at Gift of Hope ( Dec 04- Oct 06)and certainly empathize with the news that 4 recipients developed HIV after receiving organs from one high-risk donor back in January. Its sad because this hasn't happened since 1986 way bad when AIDS was "new". I'm sure my colleagues in Hospital Development (HD) will have a bit tougher job over the next few weeks. I'll continue to rant about the unfairness of people complaining about this, its a matter of the lab tests not being able to detect HIV in a high risk donor who had only recently acquired it. The Elisa test does not pick it up, but the PCR test is more sensitive and maybe able to detect earlier development of AIDS in the body. The problem is that not enough people choose to donate, so that doctors and patients are basically forced to choose between the possibility of developing a disease from a high-risk donor, and Death if they choose not to. So I sent a message of support to my friends in HD to let them know I'm with them in spirit, and to thank them for being on the front lines! Its a hard job... and emotionally demanding.