Editor’s Note: Reg Green (nicholasgreen.org) is one of the regular writers for Colorado Boulevard. A few months ago he became 97. We asked him to write an article about the most important happening in his life. Here it is.
Nicholas Green (Photo – nicholasgreen.org)
In the history of medicine, how many patients, thirty years after their death, have been influencing the life-and-death decisions of thousands of bereaved families around the world every year?
By Reg Green
Perhaps only one: my seven-year-old son, Nicholas, who was shot in a bungled robbery while we were on vacation in the far south of Italy in 1994, and whose organs and corneas my wife and I donated to seven very sick people there.
Although, like us, most people normally never even think of organ donation, literally anyone might need a transplant, even a world-class athlete. Yet every year hundreds of thousands of people around the world die because of the shortage of donated organs.
Why is donating so difficult? There are many reasons, but let’s fasten on a key one. Brain death, normally caused by a blow to the head, a road accident, a fall, violence, is sudden death. Families arrive at hospitals to find that one of their members, who was in perfect health a few hours earlier and to whom they said, “Don’t be late for dinner” or “Be sure to look both ways when you cross the road,” is dead or dying. Its enormity wipes out all other thoughts, and even strong supporters of organ donation often falter. To this day I remember one image that kept recurring to me when the doctors told us Nicholas was dead: never again would I hear him say, “Goodnight, Daddy.”
So we wrote dozens of articles for the world’s largest newspapers, arranged interviews with the most popular talk shows, and gave speeches wherever possible. In time, by constant repetition — and alongside all the other bodies dedicated to curing the shortage of donated organs — the hitherto scarcely believable act of removing the organs of someone already dead, putting them into people who are dying, and getting several healthy people out of it, became real for viewers and readers from Venezuela to Siberia, Australia to Alaska.
The lesson has been learned by millions: a doctor in Dubai has just translated my book The Nicholas Effect so as to reach as many as possible of the 450 million people whose first language is Arabic. Maggie and I were part of the team that made the television movie Nicholas’ Gift, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, which has now been seen by more than 70 million people worldwide online. Even now, hardly a day goes by without us reminding anyone who will listen that the fate of several families could be in their hands at any time.
Organ donation doesn’t take the pain away — what could? — but it can give us all the strengthened hope of a better world.
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