Laura’s Mom had surgery on her cervical spine last week. Early in the evening after her surgery, coming out of her anesthesia haze and still pretty doped up, the conversation when something like this:
Laura: Mom, you need to do that thingy every hour (Laura points to her mom’s incentive spirometer)
Mom: I know, I know… I need to do it so I don’t get pee-noh’-mia.
Laura: So you don’t get what?
Mom: Peenohmia – it would be really bad if I got peenohmia…
Laura: Ummmm, yes – it would be really bad if you got peenohmia… It would also be really bad if you got pneumonia…
Mom: Where did that come from???
Laura: Where did what come from? The word? Or the illness?
Mom: The word… Where did that word come from?
Laura: I don’t know… (pulling out her iPhone to look it up…) I think it’s Greek or Latin or something…
Mom: Well, it must be Latin… Because it’s Greek to me…
Mom had some spinal decompression, bone spurs removed, and some of her cervical vertebrae repaired… They used donor bone in Mom’s surgery. I don’t know if Mom would have been a good candidate to have bone graft material removed from her hip, as they can sometimes do – that could have greatly complicated her procedure and made recovery much more difficult. But Mom and her doctors didn’t have to concern themselves with that – because there was donor bone available.
My friend Annie has had back issues for years and had them addressed this summer. I know Annie because I’m paired up with her now and then for organ & tissue donation presentations – her husband, Jay, died and became a donor. I got a note from her a few months ago saying they were going to, “fuse the discs with a human allograph… Does that make me a tissue recipient? Wow, that's cool.”
Yes – that does make you a tissue recipient along with Mom. And yes, that is cool…
I regularly get to tell my story at presentations that are arranged by Gift of Hope and when I’m not speaking, I actually listen to the person from Gift of Hope presenting. (I really do! It’s not always all about me…) From them, I’ve learned that around one in twenty people will be impacted by tissue donation in their lifetime. One in twenty of us will be the beneficiary of some type of tissue donation. It might be something as critical as a heart valve, or something as life changing as a cornea – or something that allows us to stay mobile like tendons or ligaments or bone…
We so often talk about organ donation – and sometimes tissue donation does not get the same attention. There have been some wonderful and amazing tissue donors that have crossed my path, like Will and Samantha… And so many organ donors are also tissue donors…
We hear about donor’s saving 7 lives – and saving or improving the lives of 25 people when tissue donation is factored in… My mom-in-law was one of those 25 people… Anne was one of those 25 people… I’ll bet if you look around you there are a lot more people than you realize who have been impacted in a good way by donation…
There were surgeons and doctors and nurses and therapists and other medical caregivers involved in making this work – and somewhere out in this world, there was also a person who we will likely never know who helped make this work – a person or a family who was thoughtful and caring enough towards their fellow human beings to choose to be a tissue donor. Sometimes we don’t give it a second thought that this will be available to us when we need it – that our surgeons and doctors will have the materials they need to “fix” us and take some of the pain away and make us more mobile…
I’m giving it a second thought today. I’m very thankful for these donors who helped “fix” my mom-in-law and Annie. And if you haven’t considered organ and tissue donation – give it a second thought today… Sign up on your state’s registry…
