100,000 People Waiting - What It All Means:
Numbers are a funny thing. In golf, you work for a low number;
in most other sports, you hope for a high number. The world of donation
and transplant has a similar numeric duality. We want the number of
organs we recover for transplant to be high. On the flip side, we want
the number of people waiting for an organ transplant to be low.
Unfortunately, the inverse is our reality.
Recently the number of people registered on the national organ
transplant waiting list topped 100,000. And another name is added every
13 minutes.
When I started working at Gift of Hope nearly 13 years ago, I remember learning that more than 44,000 people were waiting for an organ transplant. The number was incomprehensible to me because I just couldn’t grasp how we were going to get enough organs for all of those people? Over time, the list kept growing, and growing, and growing. And my frustration grew along with it! I was working hard – side-by-side with so many other dedicated people in our community – to eliminate the waiting list, and we were losing ground.
And now this!
This is not a game, and high numbers here don’t signal victory.
Please take a minute to mourn the sad news that there are now 100,000 people waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant. Take the next minute to register to be a donor (if you haven’t already), and then take another minute to email all of your friends and encourage them to register too!
Together, we can make a difference in helping save these lives.
-Dave
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