The original article can be found in: Trinidad Newsday By Miranda La Rose
The National Organs Transplant Unit (NOTU) yesterday marked its 100th kidney transplant with the planting of two pink dwarf poui trees on the compound of the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, Mt Hope, but said it is now in need of some 400 kidneys.
NOTU Medical Director Dr Lesley Roberts told Newsday the tree planting exercise was part of a month of public education/awareness activities to commemorate and celebrate these transplantations.
“Now you cannot perform a transplant without donors, so we have decided to plant two trees — symbolic of the tree of life — to honour donors of the past and donors to come.”
The two trees will represent deceased and live donors. “Everytime we do a kidney transplant we will decorate a tree with either a white ribbon to indicate that the donor was a living person, or a blue ribbon to indicate that the donor was a deceased donor.” With her usual appeal for donors, Roberts noted there 600 renal failure patients, out of which 400 require kidney transplants immediately. At present all patients are on dialysis.
“Please donate. With donation, particularly after you have passed on, you can save at least two other people,” she begged.The important thing is to speak with your family, she said, “they are the ones who make the final decision.”
Kyle De Matas — son of Jacqueline De Matas a deceased kidney donor — who helped to plant one of the trees told Newsday it was an honour to know that his mother and other donors could have thought about giving someone else a second chance at life by donating their organs.
Roberts noted that one of the persons who received Jacqueline De Matas’ kidneys “is alive and doing well. She is so grateful. She has her life back. She is functioning as ‘a normal person.’ No more dialysis. She just takes her medication, is raising her family, and being a wife. That could not have been possible without Mr Matas’ mother’s donation.”
According to the Newsday’s August 6, 2007 edition, one of Jacqueline De Matas’ kidneys was given to the woman on August 3, 2007. The other organ was rejected by the male to whom it was given. The report said she was “the first cadaveric kidney transplant donor in the English-speaking southern Caribbean.”
According to the report, prior to the kidney transplant from a deceased donor, some 18 transplantations had been done with kidneys from live donors.
North Central Regional Health Authority Director Wayne Munroe, and consultant anaesthetist, Professor Phyllis Pitt-Miller, who was a member of the team that performed the 2007 surgeries, also added their voices for organ donors.
According to Munroe, “when someone donates an organ it is like the passing of a baton, passing on life to another.”
