Organ donors stuck at home
On day two of the San Francisco Bay Area’s stay-athome orders in March, Nohemi Jimenez got into her car in San Pablo, Calif., waved goodbye to her threeyear-old son and drove to her regular Wednesday dialysis appointment.
The roads were deserted. No traffic. Jimenez, 30, said it is hard to admit what she thought next: No traffic meant no car accidents. And that meant she’d be on the waiting list for a kidney transplant even longer.
“I don’t want to be mean, but I was like, ‘Oh, my God. Nobody’s going to die,’ ” she said. “I’m not going to get my transplant.”
Jimenez was 20 and pregnant with her first child when doctors discovered she had been born with only one kidney, and that lone kidney was failing. By age 29, doctors told her she needed a new one. It was strange and scary, she said, waiting for someone to die so she could live.
“You’re just thinking about it,” she said. “It’s sitting in your mind. It just can never leave you alone.”
Deaths from accidents are the biggest source of organs for transplant, accounting for 33 per cent of donations, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, UNOS, which manages the nation’s organ transplant system.
But since the coronavirus forced Californians indoors, accidents have declined. Traffic collisions and fatalities in the state dropped by half in the first three weeks of sheltering in place, according to a study by the University of California, Davis. Drowning deaths dropped 80 per cent in California, according to data compiled by the non-profit Stop Drowning Now.
In April, organ procurement organizations typically see a surge in donations related to outdoor, spring break-related activities and travel, but not this year.
From March 8 to April 11, the number of organ donors who died in traffic collisions was down 23 per cent nationwide compared with the same period last year, while donors who died in all other types of accidents were down 21 per cent, according to data from UNOS.
Doctors said they’ve also noticed a decline in emergency room visits overall, not just for accidents, and this may also be limiting the supply of donor organs. Strokes and heart attacks are the second and third most common sources of organ donations. But when people die at home instead of a hospital, their organs cannot be used for transplant because of lost blood flow.
Jimenez’s phone rang at 2 a.m. on April 17. A transplant staffer told her to get to the hospital right away.
“I was excited,” Jimenez said. “But then my mind hit me: Somebody died.”
All she knows is that the donor was 19 and died in an accident in Los Angeles. Jimenez wrote a letter to the donor’s family.
“I told them that I will forever be thinking of them. I will have him or her in my body for the rest of my life, and I will live for both of us.”