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THE THEATRE doors open, you’re wheeled in with one set of lungs, and four hours later you’re wheeled out with a completely different set. The theatre doors close, but another door opens to a totally new life, a life in which every breath is not a struggle, a flight of stairs is not an impossible challenge and you don’t have to carry a pager to alert you that your new organs are ready and waiting. This is the wonderful reality of being the recipient of a new set of organs. But the flip side of this new life is the end of someone else’s.
The decision to donate a loved one’s organs must be one of the most difficult of all. Western society handles end of life decisions poorly, and the suddenness of the events that lead to an organ donation leaves most families shocked and hurting. This helps to explain the relative dearth of organ donation in Australia, despite years of efforts to raise community awareness about the shortage of donors and the length of time people must spend on waiting lists until their lucky number comes up. Alarmist and unfounded views on the procedures for organ donation contribute to the public’s reluctance to become organ donors themselves. With donor rates of about 200 per year, or ten per million, and transplant waiting lists sitting at around 1700 people per year, some patients will never receive the organ they need and will die waiting.
Because of this need for organs, new procedures have been developed around the Western world to increase the pool of potential donors. Opt-out rather than opt-in systems are one approach; another is a process that forces people to decide one way or the other when they renew their driver’s licence. Both have been tried with varying degrees of success. More radical ideas include giving priority for organs to people who have already agreed to be an organ donor. But none of these ideas has been tried in Australia....
