Organ Donor

I was just fill­ing out that card the Ontario gov­ern­ment includes with the appli­ca­tion to renew your licensee plate¹. The card has two options

• Any needed organs or tissue
• Only the fol­low­ing organs and/or tis­sue (specify)

The sec­ond option also pro­vides a blank space where you can be really spe­cific about your pre­ferred choice of organ and tis­sue you’d like to donate. Nat­u­rally, I picked the first. In fact, I think I always pick the first option but I some­how lost my pre­vi­ous card from a while ago, which is why I was fill­ing it out now. No idea what hap­pened to the orig­i­nal actu­ally, but I digress…

So any­way, while I’m fill­ing out the card I started think­ing, out of the blue as the human mind is want, “Holy crap, do they take your whole eye­ball? I mean the whole thing?!”

Weird eh? I mean, it’s inter­est­ing how van­ity comes into play in a sit­u­a­tion where I, being dead, prob­a­bly won’t really care whether I have two eyes or not. And I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why “eye­balls” popped into my head either. Any­way, I found a help­ful FAQ and it turns out they’re pretty dis­creet about these things:

“These pro­ce­dures do not cause a sig­nif­i­cant delay in funeral arrange­ments and nor do they inter­fere with an open cas­ket view­ing for the donor”

They also seem more inter­ested in corneas than the whole thing any­way, so I’m stick­ing with “any needed organs or tis­sue” and feel­ing pretty good about it². There’s also a nice sec­tion on Cul­tural and Reli­gious Per­spec­tives on Dona­tion which I rec­om­mend read­ing which I found kind of inter­est­ing as well.

¹ I sus­pect some of you may not know what I’m talk­ing about, because you are not Cana­dian and don’t live in the province of Ontario. In fact, as far as I can tell by my stats (Thank you Google Ana­lyt­ics!), a major­ity of you are in fact Amer­i­can. It’s an organ donor card from the Tril­lion Gift of Life Net­work the Ontario Organ and Tis­sue Dona­tion Agency. I sus­pect they have some­thing sim­i­lar where you live as well.

² As another brief aside, I also think that open cas­kets are a bit grue­some, always have, but I under­stand why some peo­ple choose it.