July 20, 2007 / Corpus Christi Caller-Times

As the recent series by Heather Ann White detailed, the need for human organs far exceeds the supply. More than 7,000 patients in Texas are candidates for transplants, but the available supply of organs doesn't even come close to meeting that need. For these patients, whether it is a donated heart, kidney, or liver, there is no substitute for a human organ.

The availability of most organs mostly turns on what can be an agonizing decision made by a family at their most tragic moment. It means that they must think about some one else's plight just as they are dealing with their own sorrow.

Yet the decision to donate organs is perhaps the most compassionate and generous act that a family can offer in the memory of their departed. That's what the family of Scott Bickel of Huntsville, a 23-year-old man who died in a car accident, learned, though understanding the value of donating was at first difficult. Bickel's heart saved the life of a local man, his kidneys gave new life to a local young man and a retired nurse in Tyler, his corneas gave another man sight, and his skin was used for grafts for 40 burn patients.

Great strides have been made in state legislation and in the operation of organ procurement systems on behalf of donors and patients. Donor candidates can relieve their families of a great burden and make their wishes known by registering with the Glenda Dawson Donate Life-Texas Registry, a list maintained by the Texas Department of Health and available on its Web site. It is named in honor of the late legislator who sponsored the original registry. A recent legal opinion, defining the registry as a first-person consent, insures that donors will have their wishes carried out.

And the three Texas organ procurement systems say they are operating in closer cooperation in an effort to overcome the arbitrary geographical lines that govern the 58 systems in the nation. Critics have said that the geographical lines have bound patients to donated organs only within the system where they are registered, making for inequitable distribution. Some desperate patients have been driven to register with several organ procurement systems across the nation to give them the best and quickest opportunity for a needed organ. But officials for the system in which Corpus Christi is located, the Southwest Transplant Alliance, say that system and the two other state systems have agreed that if a patient is a high priority on one list, he or she has equal priority on all their lists.

But the chief challenge to available organs to save lives is neither legal nor bureaucratic, but simply the need for more people to register as donors. That depends on decisions made long before the critical moment when the opportunity to save a life presents itself.