Asking grieving families to give the gift of life
Print Edition
LI Cuiying walked quietly through a cemetery, stopping from time to time in front of a grave and paying her respects.
Thinking of those beneath the tombstones, the 31-year-old was sure of one thing: in a way, they were still living somewhere in the world.
Li is an organ donation coordinator in central China’s Hunan Province, and she was viewing the graves of people who had made donations. “Organ donation means rebirth, as well as continuation,” she says.
Organ donation coordinator is a new profession in China, created in 2010 when an organ donation system was introduced nationwide.
By setting up a registry for donors and a distribution mechanism for recipients, it aims to speed up transplants.
A coordinator’s job is to convince relatives of potential donors and to help with the entire process of donation.
In 2010, Li was a nurse in the organ transplant section of the No.3 Xiangya Hospital of Central South University.
“Please, when can I have the transplant?” she was frequently asked by patients waiting for donated organs. Many passed away in despair.
In China, 300,000 patients need organ transplants a year, but only 10,000 are lucky enough to get the operations.
Human organs are typically procured via three channels: donations from executed prisoners; patients’ relatives; and other ordinary citizens.
Although the State Council issued regulations on organ donations in 2007, it has not proved easy to popularize the practice, as Chinese custom calls for burial or cremation with the body intact.
“As a nurse, I felt really sad for the patients,” Li says. “So I said to myself, ‘How can I help?’”
In March 2011, she became a coordinator. The job is a difficult one, she admits.
“With your relative dying in bed, a stranger approaches you and asks if you would like to give up their organs. How would you feel?” Li asks.
She is used to being misunderstood or even reviled. Once, a man pushed her away and yelled, “Go away, you’re nuts!”
On another occasion, a group surrounded her, demanding to know how much cash she could rake in through selling organs.
Couldn’t bear to sign
Even those who had thought of organ donation often hesitate at the last minute.
In one case, Ou Wuzhang sat outside intensive care where his 22-year-old son, Ou Liang, was on a life support machine.
Dying from brain cancer, the younger Ou had told his father to donate his organs, but the grieving parent couldn’t bear to sign the agreement.
Li gave him two contrasting photographs. In one, a kidney patient looks miserable while waiting for a transplant. In the other, a patient beams as he is ready to leave hospital after a transplant operation.
Three hours later, Ou Wuzhang signed the form.
In the past four years, Li has been involved in 80 donation, over half the total in Hunan.
Li says she dreams that more people can break with tradition and understand the significance of organ donation.
“I hope more people can sign a donation agreement form, so that when their lives come to an end they can still give another person a chance to live.”
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