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The difference they talk about making.
If you don't have the donor spot marked on your driver's license--if you haven't let your next of kin know that you would like to be an organ donor--please take the time to consider doing so now. The medical staff will be no less assiduous about trying to save your life if you're a donor, but if something bad happens and your life is lost, you might save someone else's.
I brought this up when Mike Ford died, because given the timing of Mike's kidney transplant and my meeting him, I probably wouldn't have had a friend called Mike Ford if not for the kidney transplant. I would still have enjoyed the works of brilliant author John M. Ford, but that's a pretty important difference.
Tonight my great-aunt Donna died. And she was my great-aunt Donna, someone that I know, someone whose voice I can hear in my head teasing me, rather than "my grandma's sister Donna, I don't know, she died when I was little" because twenty-five years ago, she got a kidney transplant. My cousin Kellie, who is almost exactly my age, got to know her grandmother as an adult. She got to bring her four children to visit their great-grandma Donna. All of her life until tonight has curved to hold a beloved grandmother. A beloved grandmother only a few years older than my beloved grandmother, who had so much of the same taste that they and their other close sister, Aunt Doris, often showed up at family parties dressed alike, in clothes they'd bought hundreds of miles apart without consulting each other, same purses, same coats. Kellie and her sister and first cousins got to know their grandma as anything but a name because of a kidney transplant.
So mark your donor cards, okay? Seriously. Give it some thought. Make sure the people close to you know what you're thinking on this. It's pretty important.
I brought this up when Mike Ford died, because given the timing of Mike's kidney transplant and my meeting him, I probably wouldn't have had a friend called Mike Ford if not for the kidney transplant. I would still have enjoyed the works of brilliant author John M. Ford, but that's a pretty important difference.
Tonight my great-aunt Donna died. And she was my great-aunt Donna, someone that I know, someone whose voice I can hear in my head teasing me, rather than "my grandma's sister Donna, I don't know, she died when I was little" because twenty-five years ago, she got a kidney transplant. My cousin Kellie, who is almost exactly my age, got to know her grandmother as an adult. She got to bring her four children to visit their great-grandma Donna. All of her life until tonight has curved to hold a beloved grandmother. A beloved grandmother only a few years older than my beloved grandmother, who had so much of the same taste that they and their other close sister, Aunt Doris, often showed up at family parties dressed alike, in clothes they'd bought hundreds of miles apart without consulting each other, same purses, same coats. Kellie and her sister and first cousins got to know their grandma as anything but a name because of a kidney transplant.
So mark your donor cards, okay? Seriously. Give it some thought. Make sure the people close to you know what you're thinking on this. It's pretty important.