To be fair, you don’t actually get removed from an organ transplant list unless you die or get a transplant. You just get “suspended”. How you can become suspended depends on your transplant center.<\/p>\n
In the U.S. when you say “I’m on an organ transplant list.” it really means “I’m registered with UNOS through my transplant center.”
\nHere’s what UNOS has to say about themselves: United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is the private, non-profit organization that manages the nation\u2019s organ transplant system under contract with the federal government.
\nThey’re a class act. They’ve got really strict rules about fairness and equality, they’re pivotal in promoting both deceased and live organ donation, a lot of their staff are volunteers, and they are awake and running every hour of every day of every year.
\nUNOS provides the organs and the basic guidelines of which organs go to whom. For instance even if an adult is a perfect match for an available child’s kidney, the organ will go to the child who is the best match on the pediatric list even if they aren’t as good a tissue match. The transplant centers provide the rules for everything else.<\/p>\n
It’s the rules for qualification for the individual transplant centers that can trip you up. Each center has their own rules about who they’ll take on. Everything from your health insurance (will you have the same insurance for at least the next two years?) to physical health (do you meet that center’s “medically eligible” standards?) to financial and family status and whether or not you live in an area where you have access, or can get it, to the unusual pharmaceuticals that you’ll need for the rest of your life.
\nAnd the vaccines! Doux Jesus, the vaccines!
\nJust a wee tip for anyone out there who may be leery of vaccinations for whatever idiotic reason: You cannot get an organ transplant if you’re an anti-vaxxer. Period. Andrew got a TDaP and MMR booster, he was vaccinated for hepatitis A and B (and maybe C and E, I don’t know), he was vaccinated for shingles, pneumococcus, and a couple others that I lost track of. For a couple of months after Andrew was listed through the University of Washington’s transplant center every single damn time he came back from a doctor’s appointment he’d been vaccinated for something else.<\/p>\n
Spoiler alert! Not all transplant centers are the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To be fair, you don’t actually get removed from an organ transplant list unless you die or get a transplant. You just get “suspended”. How you can become suspended depends on your transplant center. In the U.S. when you say “I’m on an organ transplant list.” it really means “I’m registered with UNOS through my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-margarets-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5313"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5316,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5313\/revisions\/5316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}