98. Sign up to donate organs

I have to say, it’s a bit anti-climatic to spend years thinking about donating your organs and spending only two and a half minutes actually signing up to do so. A couple of clicks and filling in one online form available on the BC Transplant Society website later, I am, to all intents and purposes, an organ donor!

(Well, as soon as they send me my confirmation email and I verify myself on the registry, anyway.)

So for those of you who’d like to donate, but think you need lots of time to sit down and fill it all in correctly — you really don’t. Just three minutes, including time spent getting your CareCard ready.

Live Life. Pass It On. (From BC Transplant Society. Credit: Eva Markvoort and Cyrus McEarchern.)

I decided to donate my organs a few years ago, but put off signing up until I had a conversation with my parents about my intentions. Because, although it’s not legally required to get consent from your next of kin, I thought my family had the right to have this discussion. Would it potentially upset them? Given that my family is everything from agnostic to atheist to pragmatic believers, but not practitioners, in some, but not all, traditional Chinese beliefs, throw in a healthy amount of Buddhist philosophy, a diluted dose of Christianity, and a minuscule smidgeon of Jewish heritage that no one (except myself) actually seems to pay any attention to — I had absolutely no idea how they would react to this particular announcement.

They weren’t at all upset.

It turns out, when I visited them this time around and asked, that my mother is adamantly against my donating blood and totally cool with donating organs. Her philosophy is that one might make me dead and the other, I already am so it doesn’t matter. Which is not really the kind of catchy phrase that one gleans from either Blood Services or the Transplant Society’s campaigns; I think, perhaps, that she might be thinking of the increase in AIDS in China in the 1990s when there was a sharp increase in HIV-positive cases due to infection through blood donation (or blood selling, as it really was at that time). Or perhaps she’s remembering the number of times I’ve suffered from low blood sugar in the last several years and how she doesn’t want me fainting on her hands again. Either way, we didn’t bother talking much about donating blood since I’m not eligible to do that anyhow.

Speaking of blood donations, did you know that if you can’t donate blood for transfusions, you might be able to donate to research instead? That’s for all you travellers who’ve been to malaria-infested places and the like. How exciting! (Can we tell that I want to donate blood, too? Maybe in another several years.)