I was asked to personally renew my driver's license at the DMV this year so that I could get a new picture taken and get my vision test done. While I was there, I started to fill out the renewal form and there's one section that asked if you would prefer to be a tissue/organ donor after death.I remember when I firstly registered for my driver's license at the age of 16, my mom asked me to leave that section empty. I asked her why as I wanted to be one. My mom has been a nurse at the operation room in a hospital for almost 20 years and being a health profession herself, I thought she should know better about the importance of restoring someone's life through organ donation. My mom told me that she had witnessed various scenes of doctors from different departments rushed to the cadavers to remove the organs they wanted. Sometimes they needed to cut open the ribcage or other supporting structures to get to where the organs were located. In order to fill up the collapsed ventral area (as the body would eventually be picked up by the family members), the hospital staff would just stuff "anything" (such as wooden sticks and cotton swabs) into the body and sewed it up. My mom described those scenes as "pathetic" and that's the reason why she didn't want to be a tissue donor. At the age of 16, I listened to her and I never had that little pink sticker at the back of my driver's license.
So many years have passed, I now fully understand why my mom would come up with that reasoning. My last job required dealing with fresh human tissues (and I had worked with human liver and lung many times). Basically, the tissue designated for research purpose are normally rejects or failures from transplantation. I would get calls from the government tissue distributors late at night or anytime during the day to ask if I was interested in accepting them. They usually would give me a brief medical history of the donors and see if the tissue condition was appropriate for our research. After working with these human tissue and seeing how I would "jiggle" it to accomplish my tasks, I honestly do not want my own tissue to end up at a laboratory one day. Some very small chunks that got submerged in buffers would be hard to scoop them out as solid waste, so I normally just pour some bleach into the buffers (to disinfect any possible contaminants) and pour the whole thing down the sink. I felt bad to see some human tissue getting drained away, but that's what happened.
Then, before I handed in my renewal form for my driver's license, I asked one of the DMV staff if it's possible to classify myself as a tissue/organ donor only for transplantation but not for research purpose. Unfortunately, it's not possible.
I hesitated for a little while, but I decided to become a tissue donor anyways. I just have to hope that my organs are still functioning well enough for transplantation when I die one day, so they won't end up in a laboratory or getting stuck inside a drainage pipe ... V.v
