Why Is Organ Transplantation Important

As of August 2017, more than 116,000 of men, women, and children are on the national transplant waiting list and at least twenty people die waiting for a transplant. Organ donation is a process of surgically removing an organ or tissue from one person (the organ donor) and placing it into another person (the organ recipient). Transplantation is necessary because the organ recipient’s organ(s) have either failed or been damaged by a fatal disease or injury. Information gathered from a government-funded website, organdonor.gov states the organs and tissues can be donated living or dead, but organs must be obtained 60 minutes after death and tissues 24 hours after death. The organs that can be donated are; hearts, lungs, kidneys, pancreas, liver, …show more content…
Some organ transplantations may go unsuccessful due to the organ reciptent’s body rejected the donated organ. On December 23, 1954, the first successful living human organ transplantation made history. Written in The American Journal of Surgery, the successful kidney organ transplant procedure was performed and led by Doctor Joseph Murray and Doctor David Hume at Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Both doctors were able to successfully transplant a kidney from one twin, Ronald Herrick into his identical twin, Richard Herrick. This whole surgery was done without any steroid medications injected in both of the patients’ bodies. The doctors predicted that since the twins’ organs were very identical to each other, their immune system had little to no reaction during the procedure (Peterson …show more content…
Deciding on whether or not to pull the plug off of life support is a huge painful decision to make. A mother in New York had to make this exact same decision for her son who had been on life support for at least two days. In an article Newsday, a mother Yolany Velez did not imagine losing her or deciding to pull the plug on her sixteen-year-old son Oscar. Oscar was a victim of a hit-and-run incident. He was riding his bicycle home from a friend’s house when he was suddenly struck by a tan or gold Toyota Camry. The impact was so hard that Oscar’s shoes came off. Many witnesses saw the incident happen, but none could be able to identify the license plate or the suspect. Even with Oscar’s bicycle STILL wedged under the car, he had still not been found. Velez wanted to end her son’s pain by taking him off life support, she could not bear to see him lying there lifeless with multiple machines attached to