AARP - Segunda Juventud - Organ Donation - Winning the Waiting Game

Winning the Waiting Game
While a bill that could increase organ donations languishes in Congress, patients who need transplants turn to the Internet, fliers, clubs, even billboards for help.

By Barbara Basler and Chad Hudnall
August/September 2006

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Phyllis McGill lives in a garden apartment in Elmwood Park, N.J., where she cares for her 88-year-old mother, reads mysteries, collects decorative cat plates and waits for a stranger to see her plea on the Internet and offer her a kidney.

The 63-year-old woman with the deep, throaty laugh and the upbeat attitude—who once worked full time and loved to throw parties—has been on the national organ transplant list awaiting a kidney since 2001. Her odds there are frightening: 92,000 people—67,000 of them kidney patients—are awaiting organs from deceased donors, but last year only 9,914 got new kidneys.

It was McGill’s daughter, who has a genetic kidney disease and cannot be a donor, who learned about a new website where online meetings between patients and strangers willing to donate while still living had led to more than a dozen successful kidney transplants. (Kidneys, like all transplantable organs except hearts, can be given by living donors.)

Elated, McGill went to the site, MatchingDonors.com, and posted her blood type, a brief personal history and a heartfelt plea. “If there is even a tiny chance I can find a Good Samaritan online,” says McGill, “I want that chance.”