It's raining hearts !!!!!!

When you are looking forward for something, it is amazing how your imagination works. I was at a meeting with a group of heart transplant candidates and their care givers along with some who already had received hearts either in the last two months or out as far as 20 years earlier. The discussion was open to who ever had a question. I mentioned there was a motorcycle fatality on I-90, was there a heart that came from this accident? The only people in the room that were aware of this were all those who were pre-transplant. No one else knew anything about it. I felt bad that the pre-transplant people were behaving like a group of vultures, looking around to see if any hearts may be coming up. Some of the pre-transplant people were reading the obituaries, and not necessarily to see the names of friends or neighbors, but the ages of people who died. It reminds me of the cartoons of the two guys washed up on some very small island in the middle of the ocean with nothing to eat. As they start to look at each other and begin to imagine the other guy is this juicy steak. The news of a heart would be most welcome. Apparently there are calls daily about potential donor hearts. The conditions of the heart (size, blood type, and even as much as a Echo-cardiogram) is made available to the Cardiology Team here at the UW. If the conditions are not right for any of the recipients on the list, the heart is rejected and not taken. The perfect heart could come from as far away as Alaska, but if the transport time requires that it sit on ice for an extended period of time, it will be difficult to start back up and thus would also be rejected. The success rate of transplants is a requirement of the National Transplant Board. A Hospital needs to have 95 percent or better of it's transplants functioning five years into the future to be permitted to perform transplants. And while I may be looking around me and seeing hearts all over the place, in the long run a little extra time now will be worth the full health that will come with the right heart.