Butterflies
Be An Organ Donor
You’ll almost certainly be dead anyway.
I can’t speak for everyone but after I die I’m going to use my body less often than at present. Much as I like my heart valves, fond as I am of my corneas, close as I am to my skin, I anticipate being able to do without them post-life. My heart will have stopped beating. My kidneys will have stopped kidneying. My bowel had better be out of service or I’m getting buried with a peg on my nose. It seems wasteful to take these perfectly usable bits and pieces and burn them or bury them in the ground. Happily there’s a solution: We can recycle ourselves. We can be organ donors.
We can give our kidneys, hearts, heart valves, livers, lungs, pancreases, small bowels, skin, corneas and bones to any bugger passing, and any bugger will get to live. If you’re currently alive you can donate bone marrow right now. Our transplanted corneas could restore the sight of someone with a severe eye disease or injury. Our donated bone could help prevent limb amputation in patients with bone cancer. Our donated skin could help patients with severe burns. Our heart valves could help children born with heart defects or adults with diseased or damaged valves.
That’s a big bunch of amazing things we can do. Unfortunately, humans remain largely shit so people were left to die while non-donors were buried with their bodies intact. In the UK this prompted a shift to opt-out rather than opt-in systems, so instead of being bothered to join the organ donor register people in England and Wales now have to be bothered to join the list of refusers. If they don’t, we’re nicking their kidneys! At the time of writing, Scotland is aiming to switch to an opt-out system in March 2021, while Northern Ireland is having a bit of a think about it. In the meantime you can register as a Scottish or Northern Irish donor right now. Americans can also register right now, while the other 192 of you can get Googling on how to go about it.
And before you get uppity about sharing your corneas or bowels remember you could find yourself in need of a top up. The next time we drive into a tree and find our lungs flung through the windscreen we’ll be hoping somebody somewhere has a set going spare so we get to live some more.
Be an organ donor
You'll have carked it anyway
And other people will get to live!
Zeroism
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