Not satisfied with pushing the agenda whereupon the state owns our dead bodies for harvesting, they are pushing the live donation shtick. Which is fine if you are so inclined. However, if you do donate a lung or kidney, then remember that you only have one left. that redundancy thing that’s built into our bodies? Well, it doesn’t apply to you any more.
Carl Pinder is one member of a reasonably exclusive club after he decided to donate a kidney altruistically to a stranger.
“I was thinking: well, why not?” he remembers. “And I was trying to come up with reasons why not. And even up to the day I was thinking, why not? I never saw it as a serious operation, although everyone seemed to think it was. All I’ve got is three little scars.”
Okay, fine. Good for you. However, as I’m using mine, I don’t plan to go under the knife. Also bear in mind here that donation is a fix, but not a solution. Eventually, that organ will give up the body’s constant attempts to reject it and the plethora of immunosuppressant drugs needed to prevent it.
Figures released this week by the NHS show an overall decline in living kidney donation, with 990 donors in 2017 – the fewest in eight years.
Okay. So? Given that live people are using their organs why should there be any expectation that they will give them up? Because that’s the subtext here and it ain’t so sub, either.
Last year, 261 people died waiting for a kidney transplant, many of whom could have been saved through increased living kidney donation.
See what I mean? So if we don’t pop into the local hospital and hand over our spare bits, what then? Will we be required to? Okay, that might sound far-fetched, but not so long ago, the very notion of presumed consent would have been outrageous. Now, however, it goes with barely a whisper and if you object, you are not much short of a baby killer.
Paul Gibbs, a transplant surgeon at Portsmouth Hospitals NHS trust and trustee of the Give A Kidney charity, says altruistic donors are similar to Pinder: they are typically over 55, have had a good life and are looking for a way to give back. “There’s just this group of people that feel they’ve got a spare part they don’t need and someone is in need of it,” Gibbs says. “They see it as a complete no-brainer.”
Unless, of course, the remaining one decides to pack up – is that a no-brainer too? If that happens then you are in trouble. As it is, I’m using all my bits and intend to carry on using them. And if I found myself on dialysis, I most certainly would not want people having their bits harvested to save me. And the whole point here is that I am supposed to feel guilty because I don’t want to donate. That was the gist of the article. Well, sorry, but I don’t. I feel for those who are suffering, but I also feel no obligation to donate any of my organs. Because, as I said, I’m using them and intend to carry on using them.
I might have already mentioned this, and if so please tell me to bugger off. I carried a donor card for thirty one years, and cut it up and discarded it at Midnight on June 30th 2006. If I’m a second class citizen according to the Health Act, then obviously my offal is below par and I’ll take it with me thanks. After all, if I smoke I stink, right?
+1k
Absolutely concur. If they refuse to treat me because I smoke, then they can f*ck right off.
Likewise. Although I tore mine up in ’04 because the transfusion service would no longer accept me as a blood donor because I’d had a unit of blood transfused in 1994.
I did offer a kidney to a close friend on dialysis but sadly his other health issues were too great…
Interestingly, his brother didn’t make the same offer.
But to give it up to a stranger while I am still using it – no thanks.
Yes, I’d consider a close family member or friend, but no one else.
Whaddaya mean ‘goes’?!? The whole point of that Mancunian rag is that no matter who you are, or where you ‘come from’; politically, socially or ethnically, they will give you reason to feel guilty about something or the other. Same way as the Daily ExpreSS can offend anyone just by printing the TV listings.
Once they can reliably swap body parts as easily as they can swap a new engine into a car, then it will be made compulsory. Do you fondly imagine that if Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Dung or Pol Pot could have extended their lives by harvesting the organs of “enemies of the state” that they would not? China does this already – if you are sentenced to death, then the state will sell your body parts (and charge your family for the bullets that they execute you with).
Robert Silverberg wrote about it a long time ago here:
https://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/silverberg3/silverberg31.html
You want to bet that it won’t happen?
“looking for a way to give back”
As though you owe someone for having had a nice life? Bollocks. My life is what I made it and I won’t be made to feel guilty by anyone for anything
That’s how these people think. We owe them for the privilege of using our own organs.
I wonder if Paul Gibbs of Give A Kidney still has both his kidneys…
“Unless, of course, the remaining one decides to pack up – is that a no-brainer too? If that happens then you are in trouble. “
Maybe you just rely on these altruistic living donor groups? Until there’s one or two clapped out old kidneys being endlessly recycled around everyone who’s left…