On Friday 23rd, Openingscholarship and I joined a whole crowd of people for a dinner celebrating the 150th heart transplant completed at Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital (since 1997, the founding of the unit). It was an evening of odd moments - sitting in a room with some seventy people who had some 70 other people's hearts beating in our bodies, watching a young women 8 month post-tx give a display of modern dance interpretation, knowing for ourselves how she had felt 8 months and a day before. Being aware of the unimaginable cost to our donor families of the opportunity we have, and, on a sader note, of feeling the absence of missing faces.  ee cummings poem came to mind:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

 

Perhaps what was most surprsing was how the years have flown, and yet how vivid the memories of the phone call, the preparation, the first awakening post-op, all were to this rather select (if involuntary) group. Listening to the medics give their perspectives (and hearing some of them choke up too), was also a reminder of the huge team that work hard behind that 'I who have died am alive again' moment. The one surgeon had done a quick calculation that approximatley an extra 750 years of human life had resulted from the tx programme at CBMH (on average). That's quite a bit. Our 8 CBMH members of the transplant olympic games had brought back more medals than the mainstream and paralympic teams together, and certainly more golds! One woman, the oldest surving CBMH recipient at 14 years post-tx, had married and produced a baby boy - amazing as a post tx'er. Another 50-yr old man has cycled from Jo'burg to CT, via Durban, to raise awareness of organ donation. Another had chaneged career paths entirely, and gained a PhD in the 9 years post-tx. 

Donors are in short supply in SA, partly for culturalreasons, partly because of Hep and HIV, and partly because many SA medics don't support transplantation (for some odd, and some rational, reasons). But partly because we have so few registered donors. So, since you won't be needing them any more when the time comes, how about thinking of becoming an organ donor? Contact the Organ Donor Foundation Toll Free on 0800 22 66 11 or at www.odf.org.za 

And to my donor family: thanks. Again and again.