Sure! You may have my organs

Since I started working as the manager of Fourways Memorial Park, a world-class cemetery in Johannesburg, I can’t help but think a lot about death and life.

Some thoughts are scarier than others and some are extremely personal. Every year in August, we host a tribute day to celebrate and remember the organ donors of the past year. A beautiful service is held in our cosy chapel followed by a candle lighting ceremony at the sponsored memorial. The names of all the organ donors are engraved on the memorial before the event takes place and is then revealed on the day.

The guests on the day consist of various organizations that promote, manage and recruit organ donors. The guests of honour are the family members whose loved one was an organ donor and then the magical part is that some of the organ receivers also join the tribute day.

During the planning phase of the event, I got to meet Marna Horn who is the coordinator for the Centre for Tissue Engineering at the Tshwane University of Technology. She is a passionate, kind, and entertaining woman. During our conversation, I could not help but ask her some clarifying questions on tissue donation.

I always thought that when you donate your bones and tissue, one would have to be cremated. According to Marna, this is not the case. She explained that even though the bones are surgically removed, they are replaced with prosthetics. This allows the body to keep its original form. I did want to ask her if it will be possible to make my legs look sexier, but I quickly realised that it would no longer benefit me if they could.

She went on by explaining that the top layer of the skin that they remove from the donor is only from feet to chest. This allows for the donor to still have an open casket service without scaring off the children.

The Corneas of my eyes will be removed but this will not be visible to anyone at the funeral unless someone decides to do a practical joke and purposefully forget to glue my eyes shut. Between you and me, I have never seen this happen and I have seen a lot of funerals.

70 people can benefit from my skin, Corneas, and Skeletal bone donation. This is fascinating.

Equipped with all this new information, I realised that there must be a lot more that I do not know about organ donation, so I asked Stella de Kock and Marlize de Jager to tell me about the process of donating internal organs.

Stella is the Managing Director of TELL. They focus on raising awareness about the importance of organ and tissue donation. Marlize is the one that meets with families when they want to discuss the option of donating organs.

I was, once again, under the impression that my body would be completely deformed after donating my internal organs, just like I thought about tissue donation. I made the same assumption as before, thinking that I would have to be cremated and my family would not be able to have an open casket funeral.

I was wrong again.

With internal organ donation, the specialist theatre staff remove only the donor’s heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. All these organs are protected by the skeleton of the donor which means that no deformity is caused. This procedure can also save multiple lives. An open casket funeral is thus possible.

Marlize told me that the most difficult part of organ donation is the fact that the donor’s family and friends struggle to come to terms with the reality of their loved one being beyond the point of recovery. For an organ donor to be viable, the body needs to be kept oxygenated and the heart needs to still beat for blood to circulate through the organs. To do this, the machines that keep the system going are kept switched on and therefore the family can still hear the beeping sound of the heartbeat on the monitor.

Any human being would want to believe that their loved one could still wake up, even if all the medical specialists have declared that there is no brain activity present. I am also human, and I have also seen and heard about mind-blowing miracles. It is only natural to struggle with the thought of letting go at that point in time.

While we try to hold onto hope as a scared toddler holds onto his mom on the first day of school, there is another mom, dad, child, or baby whose only chance at survival is to receive a kidney from an angel. The family of the receiver are also praying, begging, and pleading for a mind-blowing miracle to happen.

I had always thought that if I passed away before I got the chance to register my name with the Organ Donor Foundation, and received my sticker on my ID, I would not be considered an organ donor. To my surprise, this also is not true.

Committing to being a donor is not legally binding. This means that only my closest relative, next of kin, or appointed decision maker, can permit my wishes to be honoured. If my family are not aware of my wishes, they might decide to say no to the request at the time. My good organs would then have been wasted and I might just come back to haunt them. All of this because I never had this important conversation with them.

Tissue donation works a bit different though. With tissue donation, the donor need not be kept alive. In fact, the donation of Skin and Corneas can be made within 24 hours after passing away and bones can be donated within 5 days of my last breath. This decision should be slightly easier to make now that we know that my body will still look fantastic after the procedure is done. Perhaps even a bit better.

As I said at the beginning of this article, I have some scary things that I think about these days and before I had these insightful conversations, I was uncertain about becoming a donor. More than that, I was completely horrified by the thought of possibly being put in the position of having to give a child’s organs for donation.

After receiving all this information though, I must admit that I am a happy donor candidate. Besides, if I donate everything I possibly can, I need not fear the possibility of waking up in a coffin, six feet underground.

I leave you with one request. Take the time to think about this and once you decided to save lives after yours had been lived, please talk to your family. Let everyone know how you feel and what you would like for them to do on the day that you return to your sender.

All my love, Jackie

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