Tammy Tozer often tells people that not all heroes wear capes, because the person who saved her life isn’t usually portrayed as your typical protagonist in most stories.
After more than six years on an organ transplant list waiting for a kidney, Tozer, 40, of Ocean View, got a call last November that her transplant hospital had one for her. But there was a caveat: the donation was from a 22-year-old man who had died from a drug overdose.
“Because it was an overdose patient, they had to tell me and if he had died from IV injection use, which he didn’t,” she said, at Village Kitchen in Marmora on a recent Tuesday. “They asked me, do you want the kidney? I said, yeah, of course.”
While efforts are being made to address the nationwide opioid epidemic, researchers have identified a spike in organ donations from overdose patients that have gone on to save people waiting on transplant lists during an ongoing shortage of organs in the United States.
"The current epidemic of deaths from overdose is an American tragedy. It would also be tragic to continue to under-utilize life-saving transplants from donors," said Briana Doby, who worked with researches from Johns Hopkins University on a recent study about overdose donations.
"Death from overdose does not change how we should see these donors. We should reject the stigma around addiction, work together as a larger community to solve the overdose epidemic and honor every gift of life given by these donors and families," she said.
The study out of Johns Hopkins University, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal, showed that overdose-death donors accounted for 1.1 percent of all donors in 2000. That jumped to 13.4 percent in 2017.
And while overdose-death donors accounted for fewer than six percent of donors in all states in 2000, they made up at least 10 percent in 29 states in 2016. In New Jersey, more than a quarter of all donors had died from overdoses, one of the highest rates in the country.
Dr. Ronald Pelletier, program director, of the Renal and Pancreas Transplant Program at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, said he’s seen firsthand the significantly increasing numbers of donations coming from overdose donors both where he worked in Ohio and now in New Brunswick.
Pelletier said experts have to determine if overdose-death donors should be designated as increased-infectious risk donors due to someone’s behaviors, like intravenous drug injection, that increase the risk for contracting HIV, hepatitis B virus or hepatitis C virus.
Even with advanced testing, Pelletier said there is still a window of time where a disease may present itself, and experts discuss with patients their risks for contracting a blood borne disease should they accept an organ from a high risk donor.
“There are some patients who just are uncomfortable accepting that kind of risk, but there are quite a few who have been on the list a long time,” he said. “New Jersey has a very long wait time compared to other places, and there are patients who prefer to proceed rather than remain on that wait list.”
There are 2,353 people in New Jersey, the majority needing kidneys, waiting for donations as of Tuesday, according to the U.S. Organ Procurement & Transplantation Network. On average nationally, more than 20 people die per day waiting for an organ transplant.
The Johns Hopkins study showed that while about 56 percent of overdose-death donors were flagged as high risk, the five-year survival rates for kidney transplant recipients of overdose-death donors and trauma-death donors were similar. Organs from the first group also tended to be younger and, in some cases, healthier.
For those reasons, doctors like Pelletier and Dr. Camille Nelson Kotton, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said people on wait lists should seriously consider taking organs from overdose patients, even ones who may be high risk.
“National and local support and campaigns for improving issues around specialized consent, medical-legal concerns and stigma associated with increased-infectious risk donor and overdose-death donor transplants would likely save many lives,” Kotton wrote in an editorial published with the study.
Barbara Taylor watched her son Fred, of Haddon Heights, Camden County, struggle with a heroin addiction. He was set to go to a rehabilitation center in California the week he died of an overdose in August 2017 at 46 years old.
As a donor, he helped save a mother of three in Maryland, she said.
“We felt if he could help another person with his kidneys, it would be a good thing,” Taylor said. “It was something good not in living, but in leaving.”
For Tozer, her transplant story had come full circle. She and her husband knew what it was like to personally lose someone to addiction. One of their closest friends, Matt Farmer, died from an overdose Oct. 19, 2012, leaving behind his then 10-year-old daughter, Lindsay.
Tozer and her family, including her 14-year-old son and Lindsay, not only advocate for organ donation, but also volunteer and work with organizations that provide support and resources to people struggling with addiction.
“There’s such a stigma against heroin and addiction that is just starting to be broken down,” she said. “When I got a kidney from an overdose patient, my one mission was to tell people, don’t think just because of your past, because you’ve used, doesn’t mean you can’t help so many people.
“I always tell people that I’m here because of an addict. My hero was a drug addict.”
Source: pressofatlanticcity.com
No comments:
Post a Comment