On Organ Donation

Here is a wonderful email from reader Michelle Siobhan Reid:

I feel tacky writing in and being like, “Post about this!” because I am sure you are inundated with these requests all the time, but there’s no harm, I suppose!

Organ donation awareness week is the last week of April for Canada & the US, and while it seems like every day is marked for awareness of something or other, my mom is alive thanks to a transplant in 2009 so I’m pretty into this one. Most people agree that they would like to be organ donors after they die, but they don’t register (you are doing better in the US, but in Canada registration rates are less than 20%), and a huge number of viable organs are lost because the deceased person’s wishes aren’t known. So it would be kind of awesome if you could nudge your lovely and receptive audience (including me! But I’m already registered) into taking all of five minutes and signing up to be donors online.

If you would like to tie it to something neat and more interesting than depressing facts about viable organs and death, I also work on this documentary film campaign about organ donation & cystic fibrosis awareness, and the film (65_RedRoses) is premiering on OWN on May 3rd. It’s a very sad, very lovely movie, and here is the trailer.

Relevant organ-donation and cystic fibrosis information for all of North America can be found here, while US- and Canada-specific organ-donation sites can be found here (US) and here (Canada).

65_RedRoses airs at 9 p.m. EST on May 3.

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