Wendy Noonan was never a great decision-maker. During her happy 23-year marriage to Glen, a detective inspector in Melbourne, she had always left the big questions up to him.
So it came as a surprise as they entered the gym one evening when he meekly followed her to the rowing machines. “I thought, You never follow me, you’re always the leader,” she remembers.
Wendy was annoyed with Glen that evening – he was unmotivated, mucking around on the equipment, not his usual playful self. Then, as Wendy got into her rowing stride, she sensed Glen looking at her. He gave one massive pull on the machine, then fell back, unconscious.
Glen was rushed by ambulance to the local hospital, and then flown by helicopter to the Royal Melbourne hospital.
As Wendy sat with her son and brother-in-law, a grim-faced doctor brought the devastating news: Glen had suffered a severe brain haemorrhage.
“So, what’ve we got – six months?” Wendy asked, thinking she was being dramatic.
“Actually, no,” the doctor replied. “You probably have an hour and a half.”
As Wendy tried to absorb the news, a hospital staffer approached her with a query: “Have you ever thought about organ donation?”
Wendy’s initial reaction was fury. “I thought, You have to be kidding. They were asking for something that was too much for me to comprehend.”
Like most Australians, organ and tissue donation was something Glen and Wendy had never discussed. Both healthy and in their mid-40s, the subject hadn’t seemed relevant. But while she sat with Glen as he lay on life support, Wendy started to think.
“Glen donated blood. He was out there in the community,” she tells it now. “There is no way that I could ever imagine him not wanting to become a donor.”
As Wendy thought it through, she realised agreeing to organ donation meant part of Glen would live on in other people. “It also gave me time to adjust to him actually going.”
Wendy called together her grown-up children, Sherrie, Mathew and Rachel, along with Glen’s father and sisters. They agreed with Wendy’s choice, but it was a long and draining conversation. And all Wendy wanted to do was to get back to Glen’s side, to spend every last precious minute with him until the end.
The next day, after a medical team collected his body, they carefully removed all of Glen’s major organs. They have given the gift of life to seven other Australians.
Wendy knows she made the right decision. But it could have been so much easier.
“It’s like a will,” she now figures. “You can put your wishes on paper and save your relatives some grief. Or you can leave uncertainty.”
The crisis
Australia has one of the highest success rates for transplantation in the world, yet – frustratingly for doctors and patients – the number of donors we have is at the same time among the lowest in the developed world. There is a dire shortage of available tissues and organs.
Last year, many thousands of Australians were hoping for a transplant to give them a second chance at life, but by December only 202 Australians had become donors after death.
The huge gap is not due to lack of community enthusiasm for organ donation. Last year, a nationwide survey found that around 94% of people support organ and tissue donation, says Marcia Coleman, chairman of the national organisation Australians Donate.
Nor can the shortage be explained by saying too few people die in circumstances where they could become donors. Each year, many Australians end up on life support in intensive care with no possibility of recovery. (see Who is Suitable?)
The shortage is fuelled by the fact that too many of us don’t take steps while we are healthy to inform others about our wishes and to help clear the way to donation.
Unfortunately, many well-meaning Australians think that ticking a box on their driver’s licence renewal form will be enough to ensure our organs are taken if they die. That’s not the case.
