We've recently had organ donation week here in the UK. The aim is to raise awareness of organ donation and to get people signed up to the organ donor register.
The other donor option we have in the UK is that of blood donation, which you can do long before you become dead. I signed up before I went to university, but due to bad admin and me being sporadically ineligible (for body piercings and sleeping with gay men), I didn't donate whilst I was a student and had my first (and only visit) nearly ten years later. Just after this, I went to Africa - meaning I was ineligible again.
If you move house, the blood service will change your address, but won't update your nearest donation centre, meaning that when I lived in South East London, I was being sent details of sessions in Essex. The same thing happened again when we moved from South East London to the wilds of Kent. After that, I fell off the radar, as I didn't want to pre-book an appointment to donate, and the blood service didn't like people to just rock up as and when. Then I got diagnosed with RA, got put on drugs that meant I couldn't donate and the rest, as they say, is the aggregate of past events.
I'm a universal donor - which means my blood type is O- and I can donate to anybody. You know in medical dramas when they call for X units of O neg? That's my blood type. The American Red Cross has an explanation here. Even though I know, logically, it's not my fault I got arthritis, I still get a twinge of guilt when friends donate, or when the blood service has a recruitment drive, as I know how useful my blood could be.
I signed my donor card in 2009, almost four years before being diagnosed. This is the first year that it has crossed my mind to ask whether there's a link between not being able to donate blood and not being able to donate organs. Actually, it turns out there isn't:
I cannot believe how much this has made me smile, how happy I am at the thought of being cut up after I'm dead. Actually, I'm fibbing. The thought of being cut up after I'm dead makes me feel a bit squeamish, but I won't need my organs after I'm gone; may as well pass them on to somebody who does).
The other thing that made me smile (although I didn't realise it until I'd actually written it down), is that I still have the choice of donation. It may happen that my organs are deemed to be totally past it at the moment I'm ready to donate them - and that's fine. The point is that RA hasn't automatically negated my decision to try and help somebody else. The decision hasn't been made on my behalf, without me having a say-so. I now know that I (or more specifically my innards) can still be of value to society despite me being ill - and that feeling is priceless.
