I Didn’t Need an Organ Donor Card

(I still do not have an organ donor card!)

At the time I was donating, living donations were rare in the UK.  As a result I had difficulty finding out what happened to the donor after the transplant. Other than stating the donor survived the operation, most websites were very unhelpful. So I swore that if I survived I would make sure no other potential donor (with access to a computer) would have to scrape around to out about the experience of the process both emotional and practical from the point of view of the donor.

I expected  that  I  would easily find a site that might want to feature the information I sought to impart.  I searched  and searched for sites where I could send my story. They were however uninterested  in living donor stories as their sites were effectively tribute sites to  kidney donors who had passed away.  I tried medical sites as well but those either focussed on describing transplant surgery, encouraging people to donate or both.

At last I happened upon  a website in the UK that agreed to take my story but the word count was  very restricted. This was normal given that the donors they featured had died. Unable to figure out which parts of my donation should remain and which should be cut,  I sent the whole thing to the webmaster explaining my difficulty and giving him my blessing to cut as he saw fit. To my surprise he wrote back saying he felt the whole thing should be published. I had done my duty.

Then a month later the organisation behind the website decided to focus solely on recipients and my story disappeared. This was the motivation for creating my own website expanding the information to assist others. For ease of reading I have decided it into nine parts.