Persuasive Speech On Organ Donation

viii. Brain Death must be established- person must cease having neurons firing in the neuro system

For over 13 year I have worked in healthcare and I have seen multiple patients die from organ failure as they waited on the transplant list. I’ve seen patients lose their quality of life as they sit in hospitals for weeks and months at a time as they waited for a kidney transplant. I also know people who have donated the organs of their loved ones and were blessed to know that their loss was the beginning of another person’s life.

Please try and consider the following situation. You’re sitting in an emergency room, waiting for your dad to awake after falling into liver failure, costing him to need a new liver. Not knowing if it’s possible, crossing your fingers. You wish you could help, but you can’t. Someone else can. An organ donor. According to organdonor.gov, about 116,000 U.S. citizens are waiting on the organ transplant list as of August 2017. To put that number into perspective, that’s more than double the amount of people that can fit into Yankee Stadium. And to make matters worse, 20 people each day die waiting for a transplant.(organdonor.gov) Organ donation can offer patients a second chance at life and provides

1. People of all ages and backgrounds can be organ donors, and if you are under 18, you must get permission from your parent before registering as an organ donor.

I’ve gone through days of chemotherapy to kill my unhealthy bone marrow and I feel awful. I’ve been stuck in a heavily quarantined area so I don’t get sick since the treatments required before the transplant deplete my immune system. So today is my transplant. And yeah… and I’m not ready for it. I guess I should be thankful they found a donor so fast. The doctor who is performing the procedure came in, introduced himself as Dr. Williams; told me he was a bone marrow transplant specialist, and gave me details on what he is going to. Dr. Williams began by explaining the exact procedure bone marrow transplant. He explained that during the procedure they will begin by giving the donor special shots that move stem cells into the bloodstream and then white blood cells with stem cells are sorted out through a machine. Then he went on to the part that scared me the most: a special catheter needle will be implanted on my chest to allow the direct flow of the donor's blood to my heart for a total of a few days. He went on further to tell me some of the risks. He said that there’s a possibility that my body will reject the donor cells, my organs could become damaged, there could be nausea or vomiting, fever, and a headache. These symptoms are more common in older people and he told me that there odds of these risks are slim, so this made me feel a lot better.

“6,935 people are dying because they had to wait. That’s 19 people dying per day for an entire year”(Barry). That’s nearly 7,000 lives; which is equivalent to to almost 25% of the current undergraduate body here at UW-Madison. According to Dr. Chris Barry, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center, “19 people die per day on the organ donor recipient list because there aren’t enough people signing their organ donor consent forms”. He proposes that we need to increase people's knowledge and tear down the myths and barriers of organ donation to facilitate their decision to donate.

Everyday, twenty-two people die waiting for an organ transplant. Patients on the donor list are in need of an organ and are depending on it for survival. Some patients are on the list for weeks, months, even years with sno match. Comparatively, 6,316 people die every hour with viable organs that can be used. Doctors are not legally allowed to use these organs unless given consent by only the patient before death. If all U.S. citizens donated their organs, transplantations could occur and save thousands of lives each year. Organ donation should be required in the United States because of the significant number of lives that could be saved everyday.

Attention-getter. In the United States alone it is estimated that 122,957 men, women, and children need some kind of organ transplant according to the united network for organ sharing.

In the United States alone more than 116,000 men, women, and children are waiting to receive an organ but only about 28,000 operations are done each year, one person can save and or heal eight up to 85 lives with organ and tissue donations. Every day 22 people die waiting for a lifesaving operation and every ten minutes another person is added to the ever-growing list. Many people are donors but one in every three are over the age of 50 and may not have viable organs or pass in a way to donate. For every 1,000 deaths there are only three people who pass in a way that donation can take place. Roughly 95% of U.S. adults support organ donation but only about 54% are signed up to be a donor. Up to 83% of people on the waiting list are in need of a kidney and 13% need a liver. On a yearly basis as many as 8,000 people on the waiting list die (Organ Donation Statistics).

Lack of organ donors is a major issue worldwide and we can help them by giving them a gift of life.

10% of the people on the waiting list for an organ are under the age of 18. Imagine if one person in that statistic was your best friend, or your little brother or sister. The number of organ donors is slowly growing, but so is the number of people who are in need of organs. These people have the potential to live with your beneficial help.

By this time tomorrow, 12 people in America who are alive right now will be dead.

Organ donation begins with a person who recognizes an opportunity to help others, enrolls in a state donor registry, and shares the decision to be a donor with family members and friends. The culmination of

Attention Getter: Let’s look at the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network. They tell us that 116,567 people need a lifesaving organ transplant. Of those, 75,685 people are active the waiting list candidates. There are only 12,212 donors total donors as of 2017.

On January 4th, 2017, you issued an emergency call for blood and platelet donation because the severe winter weather was eating up your blood supply causing a shortage and once again you issued a statement on July 5th, 2017, saying that, “The decline in summer donations is causing a significant draw-down of our overall blood supply, and we urgently need people to give now to restock hospital shelves and help save lives,” (Mandal). So, if I am understanding this correctly, the nation is still experiencing a blood shortage? Ok, here’s the part that I find funny, there’s an entire population that is able to donate but yet are deferred by your system. Can you guess what that population is? No? Well, it’s gay and bisexual men.