Friday 9 January 2015

On Organ Donation

5 years ago I have been volunteering on a workcamp in Berlin.
 At that time there was this huge organ donation campaign going on. It was on the posters all over the city.
I did not really give this topic any thoughts before as, luckily, I did not need to.

But being so repetitively exposed to this campaign for 3 weeks, I could not help thinking about it.


Shall I register myself to be an organ and tissue donor?
Is it a right thing to do?
Wouldn´t it be the most amazing thing to do, to be actually able to improve quality or save life or lives of other people with the body that you cannot have no longer any control of?
Shall I think about it this another way of recycling?


The more I think about it...there is a sentence that keeps ringing in my head.

6 years ago during a class devoted to genetics my biology teacher Mr. Turnovský said that by being able to cure people with deadly illnesses and saving babies weighing less than 1 kilo at birth
we are actually - if taken to an extreme - lowering the quality of our genes
In another words, he claimed that by going against the Darwin´s theory this way, the humankind digs itself a hole.


Noone really talks about this issue openly, but look at us...we are developing more and more allergies every year, babies are born with lowered immunity systems and we seem to be more prone to illnesses overall.
Should the question sound "Do I save few people´s lives or do I prefer - in a way - saving the humankind?"

Now, here is a confession about something, that very few of you know so far.

My immunity system has been so badly damaged by me consuming gluten for 13 years
>yes it took them 13 bloody years of me being constantly sick till they found out<
that without medication I would have zero immunity.
Not low immunity, zero.
I am dependant on a medicine that is being created from blood plasma that is being donated by people.
Yesterday, I actually even found out that I cannot travel to a destination where I need to be vaccinated beforehand, as my body is unable to develop antibodies.

Would that be making me a hypocrite, then? I have been receiving, but I wouldn´t want to give?

Tell me what you think.


1 comment:

  1. Let your mind and heart decide what is best. I have signed papers to donate my body to Stanford Medical Hospital so the medical students have someone to work on.

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