Transplant Donor Quotes

If you are a future donor recipient, remember: your family should be a part of your transformative journey. Both parties will experience growth as they find balance in your new life stage.

It is infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it to be devoured by worms.

An old friend once told me that whenever she was feeling sorry for herself, her mother insisted she go do something nice for someone to take her mind off her own problems. And if she got caught it didn’t count; she had to do it anonymously.

...Having felt the piercing gash of grief and lived through it, having loved to the brink of brokenness, and having learned the difference between friendship and frivolity, one eventually takes a conscious step through the invisible membrane that separates hubris from humility...

Journalists sometimes speculate about “brain transplants” when they really should be calling them “body transplants,” because, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has noted, this is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be the donor than the recipient.

the U.S., 5,000 people die waiting for a transplant that never comes.               Supply and demand.               People need donor kidneys to survive, but only a third of all kidney transplants come from living donors and 96% of those are family members.               The demand is there, but the supply is limited, not because kidneys are not available,

Singin' In the Rain might get you through an anxious week or two, but it won't get you through an anxious life. For that you need either a brain transplant (the only procedure of its kind, it has been said, in which it is better to be a donor than a recipient), a fully stocked bomb shelter, or a thorough adjustment of your perspective on existential risk and reward.

Scientists have identified individual neurons, which fire, when a particular person has been recognized. Thus, [it is possible that] when a recipient’s brain analyzes the features of a person, who significantly impressed the donor, the donated organ may feed back powerful emotional messages, which signal recognition of the individual. Such feedback messages occur within milliseconds and the recipient [may even believe] that [he] knows the person.” —“Cellular Memory in Organ Transplants

The sick suffer alone, they undergo procedures and surgeries alone, and in the end, they die alone. Transplant is different. Transplant is all about having someone else join you in your illness. It may be in the form of an organ from a recently deceased donor, a selfless gift given by someone has never met you, or a kidney or liver from a relative, friend or acquaintance. In every case, someone is saying, in effect, “Let me join you in the recovery, your suffering, your fear of the unknown, your desire to become healthy, to get your life back. Let me bear some of your risk with you.

Live donor transplant will overcome both the problem of organ shortage and the problem of cadaver livers that are damaged because it has taken too long to get consent and too long to remove the organ and get it to where it needs to be. Live donor liver transplant is the inevitable and necessary next step.’ 

The cure for HIV?” “In 2007, a man named Timothy Ray Brown, known later as the Berlin patient, was cured of HIV. Brown was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His HIV-positive status complicated his treatment. During chemotherapy, he battled sepsis, and his physicians had to explore less traditional approaches. His hematologist, Dr. Gero Hutter, decided on a stem cell therapy: a full bone marrow transplant. Hutter actually passed over the matched bone marrow donor for a donor with a specific genetic mutation: CCR5-Delta 32. CCR5-Delta 32 makes cells immune to HIV.” “Incredible.” “Yes. At first, we thought the Delta 32 mutation must have arisen during the Black Death in Europe—about four to sixteen percent of Europeans have at least one copy. But we’ve traced it back further. We thought perhaps smallpox, but we’ve found Bronze Age DNA samples that carry it. The mutation’s origins are a mystery, but one thing is certain: the bone marrow transplant with CCR5-Delta 32 cured both Brown’s leukemia and HIV. After the transplant, he stopped taking his antiretrovirals and has never again tested positive for HIV.

The idea behind a stool transplant is to “reseed the lawn,” so to speak. After exposure to weeks or months of antibiotics (including Vanco) the normal bowel flora — the organisms in your colon that help prevent infection — is weakened. They simply can’t keep C. diff out. In other words, the normal barrier function of the colonic flora is gone, and C. diff gets right back in. So putting in some normal flora from a healthy donor is like reseeding the lawn — it restores the barrier. When that happens, C. diff cannot get back in, and the infection is cured.

Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than "that shapeless scrub" so he could see her breasts. A post-op who had been impotent for seven years before the operation was found holding his penis and demonstrating an erection. Another nurse spoke of a man who left the fly of his pajamas unfastened to show her his penis. Conclude Tabler and Frierson, "this irrational but common belief that the recipient will somehow develop characteristics of the donor is generally transitory but may alter sexual patterns.' Let us hope that the man with the chicken heart was blessed with a patient and open-minded spouse.

EVEN THOUGH I KNEW it was going to be what she would ask me, Graciela McCaleb’s request gave me pause. Terry McCaleb had died on his boat a month earlier. I had read about it in the Las Vegas Sun. It had made the papers because of the movie. FBI agent gets heart transplant and then tracks down his donor’s killer. It was a story that had Hollywood written all over it and Clint Eastwood played the part, even though he had a couple decades on Terry. The film was a modest success at best, but it still gave Terry the kind of notoriety that guaranteed an obituary notice in papers across the country. I had just gotten back to my apartment near the strip one morning and picked up the Sun. Terry’s death was a short story in the back of the A section.

We also had some fun with another hard-drinking and know-it-all reporter from one of the ‘red top’ tabloids. I solemnly informed him that his luck was in, because one of our trainee surgeons was a real wizard at organ transplantion. We told him that, if he was shot through the belly, we would try to exchange his worn-out liver for a new one – and then he could start his prodigious drinking career all over again. While that was sinking in, we even asked if he had any objection to receiving an Argentine donor organ if one became available. It was all a bit of military black humour of course, but the poor chap went white-faced, and tried to make me swear on the Bible that I’d never arrange such a procedure, and would finish him off with a lethal injection instead. Transplant surgery in a Forward Dressing Station? Come alongside, Jack…

I write all this with respect for the possibility that rather than some kind of contact with the consciousness of my donor's heart, these are merely hallucinations from the medications or my own projections. I know this is a very slippery slope…. What came to me in the first contact….was the horror of dying. The utter suddenness, shock, and surprise of it all….The feeling of being ripped off and the dread of dying before your time….This and two other incidents are by far the most terrifying experiences I have ever had…. What came to me on the second occasion was my donor's experience of having his heart being cut out of his chest and transplanted. There was a profound sense of violation by a mysterious, omnipotent outside force…. …The third episode was quite different than the previous two. This time the consciousness of my donor's heart was in the present tense….He was struggling to figure out where he was, even what he was….It was as if none of your senses worked….An extremely frightening awareness of total dislocation….As if you are reaching with your hands to grasp something…but every time you reach forward your fingers end up only clutching thin air.

In The Heart’s Code, psychologist Paul Pearsall chronicles arresting accounts of our body’s cellular emotional intelligence. He tells of Claire Sylvia, the famous heart-lung transplant recipient who suddenly began craving new kinds of food—chicken nuggets and beer— as well as experiencing unfamiliar emotions. But why? Stunningly, in dreams, she had conversations with her donor (whose identity had been kept anonymous, standard hospital policy), which allowed her to locate his parents. They confirmed that her new tastes and feelings were those their son had too.

Pearsall also describes an eight-year-old girl who received the heart of a murdered child. After the transplant, the girl started having nightmares about the man who had killed her donor. Her mother then took her to a therapist. Details she reported in therapy sessions were so precise—time, weapon, the murderer’s clothes, crime scene—that they notified the police. Astonishingly, the girl’s information led police to the murderer.

Another possible solution would be to think about kidney exchange in a global way. There is virtually no kidney transplantation, and little or no access to dialysis, in places such as Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, where kidney failure is a death sentence. Presumably, many kidney patients there have willing donors, but in a country such as Nigeria, for example, where fewer than 150 transplants occurred from 2000 to 2010, that willingness doesn’t do patients any good. But suppose we were to offer them access to American hospitals, at no cost? That may sound expensive, but it wouldn’t have to be—indeed, it could be self-financing. Remember that removing an American patient from dialysis saves Medicare a quarter of a million dollars. That’s more than enough to finance two kidney transplants, as well as postsurgical care and medicines. That money could pay for an exchange between an American patient-donor pair and, say, a Nigerian pair.

Indeed, by the 1780s, his teeth had become so bad that he sought treatment from the itinerant French dentist Jean Pierre Le Moyer, first at army headquarters in Newburgh then on several occasions at Mount Vernon. Le Moyer specialized in the risky procedure of tooth transplants, which involved extracting a diseased tooth from a patient and replacing it with a healthy tooth obtained from a donor. Washington resorted to this procedure during the 1780s, with the healthy teeth coming from his slaves, who received thirteen shillings per tooth, or about one-third of what Le Moyer typically paid on the free market.

It wasn’t until cyclosporine was discovered in 1976 that the balance between preventing rejection and avoiding infection greatly improved. That plus simultaneous efforts to figure out how to better match donors to recipients and the discovery of newer, better drugs over time has created the current reality in which more than two-thirds of all kidney transplants are still working after five years, while little more than a third of dialysis patients are still alive in that same time span. Some kidney transplants last twenty, thirty, forty, even fifty years.

In preparation for his New York Times Magazine story about one woman’s heart transplant experience, he had the opportunity to attend a Valentine’s Day party held for more than one hundred heart transplant recipients. Almost every recipient reported “spiritual memories,” or feelings of the energy of their donor. Siebert writes, “All the people I met at the party spoke in the same reverent tones about the angel in their chests, about this gift, this responsibility they now bear, and the little prayer they say to the other person inside them. It was as if they were part of some strange new cult, the tribe of the transplanted.”28 No one forgets that they have another person’s heart in their chest, and Siebert acknowledges that no matter how hard we try to see the heart as “just a pump,” every heart transplant recipient seemed to “re-inform themselves with a larger spiritual significance.

domino transplant” in which she received a healthy heart and lung from a deceased donor and her still-healthy heart was given to another patient; this way, her new lungs, connected to their original heart, are less likely to fail.)

Working from the other end of the digestive system, fecal microbiota transplantation, FMT for short, is a more radical approach that is being used already to treat colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, and other inflammatory illnesses.25 The technique is simple, though not quite as relaxing as drinking yoghurt: a sample of microbiome from a healthy donor is presented to the patient via an enema, through a colonoscope, or via a tube passed through the nostrils into the stomach or duodenum. The

Similar things happen in so many diseases – the insulin-secreting cells that are lost when teenagers develop type 1 diabetes, the brain cells that are lost in Alzheimer’s disease, the cartilage producing cells that disappear during osteoarthritis – the list goes on and on. It would be great if we could replace these with new cells, identical to our own. This way we wouldn’t have to deal with all the rejection issues that make organ transplants such a challenge, or with the lack of availability of donors. Using stem cells in this way is referred to as therapeutic cloning; creating cells identical to a specific individual in order to treat a disease.

They treated nine obese men with an infusion made up of stools collected from lean donors, and another nine obese men with an infusion of their own stools as a control. Remarkably, six weeks after their faecal transplants, the men who received the ‘lean’ microbiotas did indeed become more sensitive to insulin. Their cells were storing glucose nearly twice as quickly as they had been before, nearly matching the insulin sensitivity of the lean healthy donors. The obese men who had had their own stool put back into their colons stored glucose at exactly the same rate after the transplant as before – their insulin sensitivity remained as poor as it had ever been.

The procedure works along the same principles as a probiotic, but rather than adding just one strain of bacteria, or even 17, it adds all of them. It's an ecosystem transplant-an attempt to fix a faltering community by completely replacing it, like returfing a lawn that's overrun by dandelions. Khoruts showed this process at work by collecting stool samples from Rebecca before and after her transplant. Beforehand, her gut was a mess. The C-diff infection had completely restructured her microbiome, creating a community that "looked like something that doesn't exist in nature-a different galaxy", says Khoruts. Afterwards, her microbiome was indistinguishable from her husband's. His microbes had stormed into her dysbiotic gut and reset it. It was almost as if Khoruts had done an organ transplant, throwing out his patient's diseased and damaged gut microbiome and replacing it with the donor's shiny new one. This makes the microbiome the only organ that can be replaced without surgery.

you’d like to encounter more of Jim Woodford’s story, we encourage you to pick up a copy of his book Heaven, an Unexpected Journey: One Man’s Experience with Heaven, Angels, and the Afterlife (Destiny Image, 2017). You can also connect with Jim at JimWoodfordMinistries.com. THREE LUNG TRANSPLANT RECIPIENT MIKE OLSEN DIED AND MET HIS ORGAN DONOR IN HEAVEN MEET MIKE OLSEN Louisville, Kentucky pastor Mike Olsen suffered for several years with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that kills almost as many patients as breast cancer. Mike was relieved when he received a call from the doctor letting him know that they had received a pair

This is why I love the field of transplant. Since I began taking care of sick people, I have noticed that one of the hardest things about getting sick, really sick, is that you are separated from the people you love. Even when families are dedicated to the patient, illness separates the well from the sick. The sick suffer alone, they undergo procedures and surgeries alone, and in the end, they die alone. Transplant is different. Transplant is all about having someone else join you in your illness. It may be in the form of an organ from a recently deceased donor, a selfless gift given by someone who has never met you, or a kidney or liver from a relative, friend, or acquaintance. In every case, someone is saying, in effect, “Let me join you in your recovery, your suffering, your fear of the unknown, your desire to become healthy, to get your life back. Let me bear some of your risk with you.

Again, everything needs to be perfect. It doesn’t matter how tired or distracted you are, how many things might be going on with other patients or with your boss or your lab or in your personal life. It needs to be perfect. Otherwise, the patient will pay a huge price, the donor won’t have given the gift of life, and you will be woken in the middle of the night by a shrill pager letting you know you’ve screwed up, it is your fault, and now you have to deal with it. That’s a kidney transplant. No big deal, but one of the best things we do in health care.

By illustrating what it took for me to practice transplantation, and by painting a picture, with the stories of my patients, of how the discipline has touched so many, I hope to highlight the incredible gift transplantation is to all involved, from the donors to the recipients to those of us lucky enough to be the stewards of the organs. I also will show the true courage of the pioneers in transplant, those who had the courage to fail but also the courage to succeed.

poop pills from healthy donors to reboot our gut. Early studies show that fecal microbiota transplantation can reverse obesity, type 2 diabetes, autism, autoimmune diseases, and more.

Yes, that’s correct—poop transplants. And not only did the recipients’ health improve, but they even ended up with food cravings similar to those of the donors.

In Israel, living kidney donors are now offered forty days’ pay at their current wage, even if they don’t miss that many days of work, and they are promised priority on the deceased-donor waiting list, in case they should ever need a transplant themselves.)

Findings have become common on brain-like processes outside of the skull. The conductive structure inside the heart, like pacemaker cells, which organizes the heartbeat, can be known as the brain of the heart, just as the intestine's brain is the ganglion cells in the gut. Conduction system independence is shown when a transplanted heart continues to beat even though the nerves that connected it to the central and peripheral nervous systems of the donor have been severed. The interaction between the independent processing of the heart and that of the brain is complex and not fully understood. The trillions of bacteria that outnumber the cells of the body by ten to one are even more enigmatic, residing mostly within the digestive tract but also on the skin and in the brain and other organs. We think of these bacteria as pests, but these micro-organisms were simply introduced in vast stretches along the double helix of human DNA over eons. The consequences are immense and essentially uncharted for what we call "being alive" The bacterial part of the body, taken as a whole, is called the microbiome. It is not sitting on the skin or in the gut passively, nor is it invading the body. Actually, the microbiota is the barrier between "in here" and "out there," containing DNA, antibodies, and chemical signaling that allows the brain to do the same stuff. There is no clear role of the microbial DNA that is incorporated into our genomes, but at least this is ancestral material that we have assimilated as our own. More suggestively, this once-foreign DNA in all higher life-forms may be the swapping mechanism for genes. These discoveries demonstrate that our intelligence extends to the whole of ecology. Everywhere mentality has a physical basis. Any attempt at isolating it in the skull comes up against serious objections. Instead of treating cynicism with unbounded consciousness, we need to see that every perception is unbounded. By going beyond the illusory boundaries of the disconnected body, you cannot see, hear or touch anything in the universe. Watching a sunset is like watching yourself, actually.

Rather, I was fascinated with how going through the process of becoming Robert's kidney donor gave me a glimpse of the kidney transplant system that being a primary care doctor did not provide. Though at the time I was working on research projects on the effects of language barriers on health outcomes, my experience with Robert inspired me to change my research focus to what made some people more likely to get a kidney transplant than others. Donating my own kidney was my solution for Robert. I saw research as the way to help other people like him.

I wondered who's world had just fallen apart as mine came together. I wondered who the person was that loved the donor most. I wondered who it was that had me feeling an insurmountable heap of guilt simply for needing the transplant and then living through it. I wondered who I owed my life to.

Don't focus on what you can't do, focus on what you can do.

Like many things at Facebook, it didn't matter what the policy team debated or decided; it mattered what Sheryl thought. In this case she had run into one of her Harvard friends, a surgical director of liver transplantation, at a Harvard reunion and offered to help him source donors.