‘Donating Organs, Opening Eyes’<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

When my wife and life partner Aruna died in October at the age of 55 of a non symptomatic but deadly brain tumour, all we could do for her was to implement a family decision taken ten years ago at lunch when we had decided to donate our mortal remains for science and human welfare at the appropriate moment. After all, great people like Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming and Marie Curie risked their own successful lives and those of their beloved for the sake of discovering cures for medical ills, and for advancing human knowledge. The least we could do as grateful beneficiaries of their contributions to humanity, and as humanists, was to at least donate our dead bodies. When my own mother died at 90 a few years ago, we donated her eyes too. Aruna spread happiness and cheer to all those she came in contact with, reflecting in her personality the grace and beauty of the life that she was in love with. And it was a commitment to that principle of life that made us persevere over two days, while keeping her artificially alive, contacting in vain various hospitals in our home town of Hyderabad, India, to see if her body and her organs could save any lives. An organ donation law is in force in the state of Andhra Pradesh, but donation of corneas is how far it usually went, and no doctor or hospital was really familiar with the law dealing with cadaver transplants. This was an excruciating experience at a time when we were shattered completely, for we were willing to donate the organs at our own expense, and yet hospitals were not geared to accept them - and this in a country where there is a huge market for kidneys stolen from unsuspecting patients, and where there is a flourishing trade of body organs ...

 

Finally with the help of the Kamineni Hospital and the LV Prasad Eye Institute we could ensure that her corneas gave sight to two blind people, and her kidneys saved two dying patients. As news of this spread, there was intense television coverage and media interest and many ordinary people came forward to do like wise while the Telugu Akademy offered to publish a book on organ donations. The Indian Express called Aruna’s desire to donate her body as not just giving eyes, but rather opening them. The Hindu called it “Her way of life after death”.

 

After the organ transplants were completed, the body was donated to the Kamineni Medical College. Even this was a difficult moment, for friends and relatives wondered whether it was alright for a body of a beloved to be dissected and cut open. We had to explain to them that if buried, a body was eaten by worms and microbes, if cremated it was simply incinerated. Neither of these ways of treating a beloved’s body was any kinder or dignified by those standards. The most dignified way was to help advance human knowledge.

 

In view of the cultural resistance we discovered existed institutionally, and in view of the ground swell of spontaneous support and volunteering from many religious and non religious people to do the same when the time was appropriate for them, we have decided to set up a foundation to advance the cause of organ donation and cadaver transplants. At a memorial meeting we distributed the following pledge card, which I will encourage Humanist organisations and activists to popularise. Unless people committed to this display the pledge card prominently and therefore announce publicly their intention to donate their body, and unless they prepare their family and friends in advance of tragedy, it is a difficult thing to implement.

 

While our grieving will be for a life time, the pain is slightly alleviated as we were able to meet with those whose lives were saved through Aruna’s organ donation - at a press conference that the hospital organised. For us who are left only with tears and memories, there is the lasting consolation that Aruna who gave birth to our only son also gave life to four others.

 

Guru Babu Gogineni

E mail