Tonight they are covering the Transplant Olympics which instantly put me on edge. I'm not against organ donation per se. It's on my license that I am willing to be an organ donor and when the transplant team approached us at the hospital, I readily agreed that we should donate all of Jon's and Dad's organs and tissues. I'm just totally sick of hearing all about the recipients with their new chance at life while the donors and their families are rarely mentioned. Do people think that hospitals maintain an orchard of organ trees out back with a grove for hearts, another for corneas, etc.? The transplant program is called "The Gift of Life" program so the fact that it's a gift is right out there. Did the recipients' mothers not teach them that it's polite to say "thank you" when someone gives something to them?
The program started out okay with the leader of the event talking about how lighting the torch was symbolic of the donor passing life to the recipient. Cheesy and simplistic but okay, at least it was acknowledged that these dudes didn't get to keep living after they got a visit from the healthy organ fairy or something. I started to relax but wait, not so fast.
A 12 year old boy carried the torch for a bit. He received a heart when he was 7 months old. His mother went on and on about "what he went through, what he endured and what he has to go through and what he has to go through every year. I mean, it's not just, it's not over. It's never going to be over."
Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME??? Let me tell you who it is NEVer going to be over for...the grieving mother whose tiny baby died and gave young Jake the chance to grow up. That baby lived less than a year and his mother has been only half alive b/c of it for the last 12 years. What little Jakie has to go through every year cannot possibly compare to what that baby's parents suffer on every birthday, every anniversary, every time they hear someone else called by their baby's name. Chances are they probably aren't together any more as so many bereaved parents divorce b/c their marriage can't withstand the grief and what if's. What people don't realize is that when they get a liver, a kidney, whatever, they are also getting hearts along with it. Not healthy, whole ones of course, but chunks of broken, damaged hearts that belong to the people who loved their donor. The second-chance-at-living folks may not want the hearts, they may have no intention of ever acknowledging them, but they get them all the same b/c when you lose what mattered the most, you have no need for that piece of heart which belonged to the person you will miss forever. I know because I've given away pieces of mine.
Fuck that lady. Fuck that selfish bitch. She has no idea, NO IDEA, how selfish and awful she showed herself to be on live TV. Not to the average joe, perhaps, but to any of us who have been there. I hope she gets kidney stones every month for the rest of her life unless she goes back on TV, gets down on her knees and begs for forgiveness from the donor's parents who could have been sitting in front of the TV tonight, watching their baby's heart walking around in her clueless son and wishing with all their might that the roles were reversed.
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