The City of Sault Ste. Marie is encouraging its employees and residents to register for organ donation.
April is ‘be a donor’ month, and the city has already reached 78 per cent of its goal to get 250 people to register to be an organ donor.
“Interestingly, 85 per cent of Ontarians are in favour of organ donor registration, however, only one in three have actually taken the time - the two minutes - to register online,” said Tannis McMillan, fund development officer for the Kidney Foundation of Ontario’s local unit. “If you think about it, there’s probably about 250 employees here, and we already have 200 under our belt.”
Reg Beaudette, who was at Thursday’s organ donor awareness event at City Hall with his wife, Cathy, says that he’s grateful for the donor who enabled him to have a successful lung transplant in February 2015.
“People do not realize how important it is,” said Beaudette. “You have the opportunity to be a hero to someone you don’t know, and for them to live longer.”
Beaudette says that breathing was extremely difficult prior to his lung transplant.
“Just take a straw... and block your nose and try breathing through that, getting full air out of that.” Beaudette said. “That’s what it feels like.”
Waiting for a transplant, like Beaudette and his wife did while temporarily living in Toronto, can be costly.
The couple has lobbied for more funding for the relocation of transplant patients in the past, and now they plan on lobbying for additional money for caregivers, who are required to stay with transplant patients.
“It’s harder on the caregivers, because they see how you’re deteriorating through the weeks, and I think it’s harder on them because it’s hard for them to realize what’s going on. Thank God she was there, she was my rock.”
Beaudette would also like to see laws around organ donation change. Instead of people signing up to be an organ donor, he said, people should be registered for organ donation automatically with the option of opting out.
Beaudette encourages the public to donate, and maybe more importantly, inform immediate family of that decision to be an organ donor, because organs can’t be harvested if a member of a person’s immediate family refuses.
For Marci Oliverio, who has been the recipient of two kidney transplants — the first one happened when she was just a teenager — says that her first time waiting for a transplant was scary not only for herself, but for her family as well.
“I wasn’t a normal teenager that most kids were because I was so sick,” Oliverio said. “I got through it with a lot of support and love from my family, and when it came time for the transplant, I think I was well prepared for it.”
Oliverio now volunteers and raises awareness for organ donation, and sits on the local ORGANize for Life committee.
“I think in the long run you have that happiness and the feeling of you just helped someone else live on,” Oliverio said. “I think of it as your loved one is living on, because their organ is helping someone else live.”
“They live within me,” she continued. “They’re keeping me going, they’re still living inside of me.”
The public can go to this page in order to help ORGANize for Life reach its goal of 250 registered organ donors.
