"The One Where...Life is a Gift"

As I read everyone elses blogs, I admire that they are always so short & neat and then there are mine - long and lengthy! So I apologize ahead of time for yet another long blog!

So, as most of you know, the many duties of my job include taking call. I absolutely dread hearing that pager go off at 2am and having to crawl out of my warm, comfy bed and rush off to the hospital. Once I get there and we end up saving someone's life because they are suffering a severe heart attack makes it all worth it in the end. However, nothing irritates me more than getting called in for a coke-head who has snorted too much cocaine and who arrives in cardiac arrest. Then I go home even more pissed than I was before I was woke up at 2am! And those cokeheads ALWAYS survive - just to be released to go back out into the world and snort the rest of their life away!

The only time I don't mind being called in is for a brain-dead patient who is about to become an organ donor. We do a cardiac cath on every organ donor in the hospital before they are taken off of life support. The reason is we need to make sure the donor heart doesn't have clogged arteries as well as muscle damage before it is transplanted into someone else. It is a bittersweet situation - you have someone who is basically dead with family & friends losing a loved one. On the other hand, they are saving someone elses life and providing their family & friends more time with their loved one. It is always a different "aura" in the room when we do procedures on these patients. I can't explain it, but I would like to think it is because the patients' spirit is looking down upon us & watching over us. It is always surprisingly calm & quiet during the procedure. Eerie, I know!

This exact scenario happened to me 2 weeks ago. It was 1:30am and the pager went off. I did my usual grumble, called the hospital operator and all she told me was a name and the doctor doing the procedure. I then made my way to the hospital. When we get there we are given all the info on the patient. It ended up being a man in his 30's who had gotten into a fight outside a bar. He was punched, hit the pavement and hit the exact spot in the back of the head that will stop your breathing instantly - the brain stem. It was a very sad situation. He was young, just recently married, out for an innocent evening with his buddies and there he was - his life over in an instant. His heart ended up being very healthy, of course and he was taken immediately from our procedure room to the OR to have his organs harvested. I didn't end up driving home mad this time. In fact, I was very sad and bothered that such a young man's life had been taken from his wife, his family and his friends.

This past Friday, I received a letter as did the rest of the cath team that worked on this young man. It was from the Midwest Transplant Network. It started by thanking us for being in this man's care and then told us how this man's death resulted in 5 peoples lives being saved through his organ donation:
-a man in Wichita received his heart
-a woman & teenage boy received his kidneys
-a woman in Chicago received his lungs
-a man in St. Louis received his liver
-a woman received his corneas
-the pancreas was donated for islet cell research that will help insulin-dependent diabetics make their own insulin
-his skin will benefit burn victims
-numerous patients benefited through the donation of his tissues, bone and bone marrow

After you read how one man's life can change so many others lives is the rewarding part of my job - even after having to get up at 2am to come in. Life is truly a gift and ironically, sometimes so is death.

I am proud to say I am an organ donor and have been for many years. I'm not sure how you all feel about organ donation but if you aren't an organ donor and want to know more about it or how you can sign up, please visit the following link: http://organdonor.gov

"The purpose of life is not to be happy - but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all." ~Leo Rosten