Giving the gift of life

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Updated: March 24, 2012 9:04AM

Angelique Marseille and Don Terry beat the odds, both alive with the help of innovative hospitals, the instinct to do good and donated organs.

Marseille, 42, of Homewood, this month marked the 20th anniversary of her liver transplant at the University of Chicago Hospitals — a milestone her hepatologist said is “very unusual.” That’s because nearly 30 percent of liver recipients die within five years.

But Marseille is doing well and volunteers with Gift of Hope, an organ procurement charity, to recruit donors, especially among blacks.

Terry, 46, of Joliet, received a kidney in December, the latest of 30 people to do so from living donors in a record-setting transplant chain that stretched from coast to coast over the past year. Surgeons at Loyola Medical Center gave Terry his new kidney from a stranger in this ultimate form of pay-it-forward altruism, which ended because Terry had no living donor who could keep it going.

As impressive as this chain-of-life event was, the irony of organ transplant technology is that the need far outweighs the resource. At any moment, approximately 112,000 Americans wait for an organ, and about 6,000 die every year waiting.

Those figures make it clear that more people need to volunteer their organs after they die. Though every state has a procedure for volunteering to donate after fatal accidents, thousands of chances to be a good Samaritan are lost because of archaic procedures.

In most states, a next of kin can veto the donation or must verify a donor’s stated wishes. There are several proposals to address that. One transplant organization suggests that those willing to be donors automatically get priority on future waiting lists over those who aren’t registered as donors.

For every technological advance, there remain limitations. Of the 100,000 who die every year in Illinois, fewer than 2 percent are healthy enough to donate organs. Those who die suddenly and unexpectedly, often the young, usually are least likely to have signed up as donors.

Think carefully. Maybe the next person who needs a transplant to live won’t be Angelique Marseille or Don Terry. Maybe it will be you.