Swimmer needs a heart
There are far too few donors: one person can save seven lives
HEART failure was the furthest thing from a super-fit long-distance swimmer’s mind as he swam 7km a day. Werner Kyrt Krauss, 49, a Cape Town tourism professional, said his world crashed last September when the pains in his chest turned out to be heart failure.
Since then the ICU ward at Netcare Christiaan Barnard Hospital has become “home”, where Krauss waits, with his heart in biventricular failure, for a matching donor heart.
Instead of moaning about his pain, Krauss has been thinking of marketing ideas to get South Africans to heed the call from the Organ Donor Foundation of South Africa to register as donors, because just “one person can save seven lives”.
Cardiovascular surgeon Dr Otto Thaning, who is treating Krauss, said: “The lack of donors in South Africa is extremely desperate, as it is all over the world. There are too few donors and too many people needing organ transplants.”
In comparison to places like Portugal and Spain, where 38 in a million of the population have registered as donors, South has only two in a million registered.
“That is very sad ,and the reason is we have a lot of people who for tribal or religious reasons frown on organ donation.
“At any one time we have 4 000 people on the waiting list for organs, so we’re battling,” said Thaning. “With the cardiac group, we are only doing 10 to 18 heart transplants a year countrywide, when it should be double that.”
Thaning said the Organ Donor Foundation was constantly raising awareness for people to register as donors, so that many more people can be helped.
Krauss dreams of post-transplant days, and again doing laps n the pool. He has been inspired by a visit from ice swimmer Lewis Pugh, an organ donor registration advocate, and by Thaning, the oldest swimmer to have swum the English Channel.
Krauss urged people to register online with the Organ Donor Foundation of South Africa: www.odf.org.za, 0800 22 66 11.