The decision to donate: "like a light going on" – listen to audio

Every day, families in hospitals around the world find themselves faced with the need to make a decision about organ donation. But if you don’t know what someone wanted, should you agree that their organs can be used to help other patients?

 

> Transcript of audio

 

Listen to Petra Shakeshaft and Reg Green talk about their experiences – and how organ donation can be the one positive thing to come out of a tragic situation.

 

 

Reg Green: “Every time somebody makes a decision in favour of organ donation, it has these reverberating effects so that more and more people are likely to do it. You can feel that you've changed the world for the better and made all the difference to some other people.”

Petra Shakeshaft: “It was like a light going on. For three or four days the news had just got worse and worse, and darker and darker, and we were so completely out of control of everything. This seemed to be one thing, one positive thing that could come out of this tragedy.”

 

 

More information about registering as a donor is available by calling 0300 123 23 23

 

> UK Transplant

 

> The Nicholas Green Foundation

 

Also on this site:

> Transplant Week at Addenbrooke’s celebrates “an amazing gift to make”

 

 

 

Transcript of audio

PETRA SHAKESHAFT: The first decision that we realised we were going to have to make is to withdraw support.

 

VOICE OVER: Petra Shakeshaft's son James suffered terrible head injuries in a car crash in 2006. He was brought to Addenbrooke's.

 

PETRA SHAKESHAFT: We were preparing to go to a meeting with consultants to discuss that. And on the way to the meeting my husband told me that he'd taken a phone call from my stepmother that morning and she'd asked him to talk to me about organ donation because she felt sure that that would come up. I think at that moment – I've said many times – it was like a light going on. Because for three or four days the news had just got worse and worse and darker and darker and we were so completely out of control of everything. And this seemed to be one thing, one positive thing that could come out of this tragedy.

 

VOICE OVER: It's a decision that people find themselves facing every day in hospitals around the world. 17 years ago, Reg Green and his family were on holiday in Italy. Caught up in a motorway robbery, his seven-year-old son Nicholas was shot.

 

REG GREEN: That was the bleakest moment of my whole life. They had told us that he was brain dead. And I went into the room to look at him and saw that he was apparently breathing normally – slow, steady, chest rising and falling. Very calm – his face was all clean and neat, there wasn't a mark on it. And for just a moment I thought – he's getting better. But then I realised instantaneously that it was just the machine doing the breathing for him.

 

VOICE OVER: Nicholas's story could have ended in that Italian hospital – but it didn't. Reg and his wife made the decision to donate their son's organs. His death saved seven lives – and it touched Italians' hearts. At the time, the country had one of the lowest organ donation rates in the world – but the Green's example is credited with triggering a four-fold increase in transplants. The family went on to set up a charity promoting organ donation.

 

REG GREEN: You know, we've travelled around the world and in all those tens of thousands of miles and in all those hundreds of donor families that we've met, I can scarcely remember one who did regret it. Even the ones who had doubts at the time have come to see that it was the right thing to do. It helps the healing process – they feel afterwards that at least something good came out of all this. There was nothing else – you can't see any good in it until that moment. Your child's been taken away… what possible advantages could flow from this? And now although you'd do anything to have them back there's at least something to put on the other side of the balance.

 

VOICE OVER: What's emphasised by everyone linked to organ donation is the need to make sure that other people know what you want to happen to your organs when you die.

 

PETRA SHAKESHAFT: Talk about it. Think about it and talk about. Talk about it with your friends and your family. Let people know what your wishes would be. In a sense, be prepared for it. It's difficult to say that because these sort of things always happen to other people – they're never going to happen to us. I certainly never thought it would happen to me.

 

VOICE OVER: Petra's son James donated his kidneys and heart valves after his death – but many people leave it too late to make their wishes known.

 

REG GREEN: Every time somebody makes a decision in favour of organ donation, it has these reverberating effects so that more and more people are likely to do it. You can feel that you've changed the world for the better and made all the difference to some other people.

 

PETRA SHAKESHAFT: I think he'd be proud of it, actually. It's such an amazing gift to be able to make. It has been out of something that was so awful and traumatic, it has been the one positive thing that we've got to hold on to really forever.

 

 

 

 

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