Organ donation: Just do it

This will hopefully be the last time I blog about my mom's illness. In fact, I'm not going to write about her illness at all, rather, I want to take a couple of minutes to encourage everyone to be an organ and tissue donor.

In Ontario, you have to sign up to be an organ donor. The form comes with your driver's license, and you can either mail it back, or you can fill out an electronic version. You actually have to confirm your donor status online, so it might be better to just do the technologically advanced thing, and save a tree. Either way, it takes about 2 minutes to complete the form.

Just do it.

Here are a few points about organ donation, summarized from the Be A Donor website.

Why donate?

• According to the Be A Donor website, currently 1,500 Ontarians are waiting for an organ donation, and every 3 days, 1 of those patients dies due to a lack of a suitable organ. My Mom waited approximately 6 weeks for her liver.

The Donation Decision:

• Your decision to donate is confidential, and it will not affect the care you receive in the hospital should you become ill. The only thing we know about my Mom's donor is that they weren't local (the guess is Northern Ontario).
• Anyone over 16 years of age can donate, and you can withdraw your consent at any time.
• Although the Trillium Foundation always confers with your family before your organs are donated, your family can override your decision to donate, so make sure you talk to your family about your decision.
• Without a pre-signed consent form, only 50 percent of families agree to organ donation.

The Donation Process:

• Once a donor dies, their organs are tested for medical suitability, and to determine which patients are a best match for your organs.
• Organs that can be donated include: heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, pancreas, small bowel, stomach, corneas, heart valves, skin and bone.
• The whole process takes about 24 hours, and should not impact funeral arrangements. An open casket should still be possible.
• The family should not incur costs from the donation process.

So, that's it. I hope I'm done with this chapter of my life. As Andrew and I have discussed lately, it feels like we've lived through several lives since June, and we could do with a break.

Please consider agreeing to be an organ donor. You can save a life, possibly several.

Just do it.

Ciao,

Andrea

Anger and other possibly inappropriate emotions

Andrew tells me that in our current situation, it's normal to feel anger toward the person in your family who is sick and the cause of throwing your life off kilter.

I'm not sure I'm actually angry at my sick family member, but I certainly am ticked off at the world at large. Could the timing of this emergency have been worse?

Only slightly. It could have happened last November to coincide with Ruth's birth. That would have been a certifiably worse time to have to deal with a sick family member in a different country. Learning how to take care of a brand new baby who was a slow gainer and took over an hour to feed, while spending hours in a hospital waiting room would have been horrendous. As it is, this emergency has occurred just as we were moving back to Canada, are trying to find a house, and were to go on vacation.

Of course you can't pick the timing of emergencies. That's kind of what makes such an occurrence an emergency, right?

As I mentioned in my previous post, Andrew had to deal with the move more-or-less on his own. He managed. Most everything was taken care of successfully--except for our car. Since our car was purchased in the US, we have to import it into Canada, and to do that you have to file paperwork with US Customs 72 hours before you plan to cross the boarder. Apparently Andrew missed the deadline by a minute or two. Seriously, a minute or two.

We have to go back to the US with our car for 72 hours so we can import it. That's great. Just what we needed, to figure out when to make it back to the US to import our car with everything going on.

In some ways, this emergency has helped our house hunt, in that we're here and can look at more houses (so far we've seen 31). In other ways it only adds to the stress we're under. We saw a house we liked last Thursday night, but ultimately we felt we couldn't deal with trying to put in an offer. There was too much going on in our lives. The outlook for my family member didn't look good. How could we rationally contemplate the purchase of a house?

So we didn't. We let the house opportunity slide  by.

Then there's our vacation. We were supposed to be in England right now. We should have visited Lyme Park (aka Pemberly) on Saturday, and spent Sunday in Manchester. On Monday we were to travel to St. Bees in order to begin walking the Wainwright Coast-to-Coast trail today (Tuesday). That's what we were supposed to be doing. I've wanted to do the Coast-to-Coast for, oh, I don't know, 5 years? At first we didn't think we could do it this year either (because we now have Ruth to take care of), but then people kept telling us to go for it. The only thing Ruth cares about right now is whether or not Mommy and Daddy are around. And she loves being outside.

This is where most of my anger and despair is concentrated, the lost vacation. I'm trying not to mope about it, but it's hard. We haven't taken a vacation since I graduated from library school--5 years ago. Plus we lost most of the money we spent in planning the trip, and we don't know when we'll have time to take a holiday later in the summer or fall. Andrew starts work in mid-July and my mat leave ends in November before Christmas break. The need to travel back to the US in order to import our car feels like a booby prize.

And then I remind myself how I shouldn't be whining about my lost vacation when my family member is extremely sick.

Then I feel like I'm a bitch.

So that's where I am. I'm grumpy, annoyed, and overall stressed-out. I'm trying not to be, and I'll get over it, but it will take a while.

I'll try to find something more cheerful to post next time.

Cheers,

Andrea

Family Emergency

Without going into any details, a member of my family is very sick.

Andrew and I had to scramble to find tickets on the earliest flight out of Boston (that we thought we could reasonably make) last Monday (June 8th) morning and get back to Ontario. Have you ever had to find a flight last minute? It sucks. 'Compassion' tickets don't really seem to be a thing. When I explained we needed to fly due to an emergency there wasn't much response from the customer service agent, and there was definitely no adjustment in cost. It didn't help that we needed to transport our cat, too, as we had no idea when we'd be back to Somerville.

I'm, in fact, not going back to Somerville. We didn't want to drag our daughter and cat back and forth from Somerville to Ontario twice more in such a short period of time. Our move out of the US had been planned for this week anyway (June 15th and 16th), but now Andrew has to take care of everything on his own. We're relieved we'd always planned to hire professional movers to pack up our apartment. At least that means Andrew doesn't have to box things up on his own. It does mean, however, that he's had to run around like a mad man to finish up things we'd meant to do together.

So, now I'm in Ontario with Ruth, and Tabitha (our cat) waiting. Waiting for things. Waiting for illness to run it's course, waiting for Andrew to join me.

I don't know what to do. I'm no good at offering emotional support, as I have a strangely detached view of illness. I get emotional over a lot of things: Ruth's refusal to sleep, rejection letters, music, but death I do not. Andrew thinks it's because of my stint in nursing; that I've seen illness and old age in ways many people haven't, but that might be the nice way of saying that in instances such as this I'm a cold, hard...well, let's just say I'm cold and hard.

And I'm getting tired to talking to people and being around people that aren't my daughter and Andrew. I'm especially getting tired of making small talk with people who insist on oogling Ruth--which is happening a lot at the hospital. I get she's cute and all, and most people aren't trying to touch or interact with her, but I have to do a lot of: "She's 6.5 months," (people often ask how old he is as Ruth is usually dressed in green, blue, or white), and saying "Thank you," when people comment on her appearance or her big blue eyes.

Today I'm hermitting. Owing to a bad sleep night for Ruth (and therefore me), I'm staying in. I think I'm going to have to spend less time at the hospital in general, as it's not doing anything good for Ruth's sleep and stress levels, Hopefully today's rest will help me rejuvenate, and then Andrew will be back tomorrow.

So, that's all I feel like I'm at liberty to say right now. It helps to get a few of these thoughts off my chest. There are many more, but at this time they're not for sharing on the internet.

Ciao,

Andrea