Organ and Tissue Donation, What Is It All About?

Since I've had my job, I've learned a lot about donation that I never knew before. I thought I'd take this post and explain the basics of how this process works. I don't mince words in this post, so if you don't want to read about cadaver eyes, skip this post.

I love my job and I love the work I do. The only downside I've seen is when I encounter people who don't understand the process and have really negative things to say that are inaccurate or uninformed.

The first thing you need to know about donation is where to find information about it. Click here for that information. A wonderful website called Donate Life will give you all you need to know.

The basics of donation:

• It's not just organ donation, there's tissue donation and eye donation.
• Organs that can be donated aren't donated until you are officially dead (usually brain dead). Those are heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, pancreas, and intestines.
• Tissues that can be donated aren't donated until you are officially dead. Those are skin, bones, vertebral bodies, juvenile cartilage, heart valves, ribs, veins, eyes, and adipose tissue.
• For eyes, the donation can be the whole eye or just the corneas.
• You can donate for transplantation to help others directly, or for research/medical education purposes.

To dispel some myths about donation:

• If you sign up with your state to be a donor, that is a legally binding document, you have to change it with the registry if you change your mind.
• No one wants to kill a patient just to get their organs. It's better to save the patient you know and are currently taking care of than doing something to them for another patient you don't even know. Plus, most of what you can do to kill someone would ruin them for donation anyway, defeating the purpose.
• Donation will not affect a traditional viewing for most funerals.
• Organs and tissues from someone who has been deceased for a long time is against federal regulations, so the process happens rather quickly (within 24-36 hours past death declaration) for procurement.
• No donation process will take place without the consent of a close family member/friend.

If you're interested in donation, learn more about it. Sign up to be a donor if you want. Discuss it with your family, sign up to be a volunteer, spread the word. Once you start those conversations, you'd be surprised to find out how many people you may know who's lives have been touched by donation.

Some Statistics:
28,663 Organ Transplants Performed in 2010

14,502 Organ Donors in 2010
As of March 2010,
110,541 Patients Waiting

60,758 Multicultural Patients
1,785 Pediatric Patients

Camille Goes For Networking, Not Hooking Up

This post is about my friend Camille. I was writing about her love life on one of my old blogs on Wednesdays, and I'm continuing it here because I find it fascinating.

Camille is in law school, so take from that what you will. She an amazing friend and bridesmaid (she's planning my bridal shower thingee). She's also a hopeless romantic/relationship saboteur.

How can you be both a hopeless romantic and a relationship saboteur? It's not easy I'll tell you that. But Camille has it down to a science. She'll meet a guy and start thinking of all the romantic possibilities. We'll chat about possible signs a guy likes her, which happens to be a totally fun chick activity, and then two days later, she's telling me she's completely lost interest.

She loses interest without warning and rather abruptly. I think it helps her weed out the frogs while she's on her way to her prince. But it's certainly amusing, especially when she dropped that guy she met a the wedding of some friends of ours from church. Then she had to figure out if she was going to have to avoid birthday parties and barbecues and the like for a while.

I think you have enough background now for me to launch in to the purpose of today's post. Camille has a networking event coming up. It will have law students, med students, and business students hosted at the University of Chicago. She told her classmates this event was for networking purposes and not for hooking up purposes.

This was of course right before her next sentence asked if she will leave with a date.

I hope she meets someone there. Back when I was in med school, I was convinced that professional people should date other professional people because they understood what it was like and the demands on your life.

Now that I'm marrying a musician who was convinced he'd only end up with another musician, I can understand the need to branch out of your comfort zone. But with Camille's busy schedule, the opportunity to meet so many new men all in one place cannot be passed.

She must be dolled up, looking delectable (yet classy) and being super friendly. I just hope her classmates don't notice she isn't just "networking". If anything interesting happens at the event, I'll be sure to tell you all about it.

How do you meet new men? Should Camille just focus on networking for realsies?

Introducing... A Variety of Blog Topics!

The exclamation mark indicates some sort of fanfare. Yay!!!

I'm pretending that people will actually care enough about my blog to want to know what they're reading about before they read it. In my last post, I came up with the idea to separate out the different things I want to talk about into different memes in the (counter-intuitive) idea that it will make this blog feel more seamless.

These are not in order of importance, they're just in the order that I figured out the jpeg. So, without further ado, my blog topics.

Up first is one that I pretty self-explanatory.

A Love Life Review

This one will be for when I discuss my friends' love lives. Pink means love right? And the word love is pretty damn obvious. Mostly, it's just pretty...

Next is the one of the ones I designed for talking about my life.



All Growed Up

 That's not my hair, but everything else about the clip art just...works. With this meme, I'll be talking about career, finance, grad school, and all the general grown-up stuff that's coming at me full force. It's coming almost as fast as my 30th birthday feels like it's approaching. Okay, I"m being dramatic as 30 is still over 3 years away.

Up next is one I had a lot of fun making.

Living My Life

I may or may not be completely self-centered. Well, 80% self-centered. But I love this one and I'm looking forward to having this jpeg identify when I'm waxing poetic (except I hate poetry) about my life with Easy or my hobbies or my family or whatever else goes on in my personal life.

After I did this one, I figured that could cover all I had to talk about my friends and myself. That left politics and television.



Let's Talk About Politics



On The Small Screen

 So perhaps the phrasing isn't so clever. But I love these and I'm looking forward to having a more clearly defined topic list from which to choose. Coming up with the jpegs helped me further refine what I'm going to talk about. I love movies, but I don't have much to say about them besides whether or not I liked them.

So you can pretty much be guaranteed that if you read my post you'll read about: 1) my personal life, 2) my career and other grown-up topics, 3) my friends' love lives, 4) politics, 5) television. It feels good to have some focus!