in which context is all

[rm]

Me: Did you hear about Steve Jobs?

Patty: Hasn't his health been fucked up for a while?

Me: [blah, blah, blah...] ... liver transplant.

Patty: Did you know most people who want to be organ donors can't because the organs have to be gotten so quickly?

Me: You know stuff about morbid stuff. Well hey, if they fail at being organ donors, they can donate their bodies to the Ohio State Buckeyes¹.

Patty: You could donate your body to Glee.

Me: A thought I'm sure people have often, in an entirely different context.


--

¹ As at least one of her relatives has.

Comments

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

Patty: Did you know most people who want to be organ donors can't because the organs have to be gotten so quickly?

That's sadly accurate. HOWEVER - if you're damned bound and determined to be an organ donor, living donation is possible for kidney, liver (a lobe), and lungs (a lobe) if you're healthy and a match for the transplantee. /PSA

(Don't mind me. My bestie is four years post kidney transplant, thanks to a living donor. He would have died without the transplant.)

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

And last year the fandom community helped get Deb Mensinger's brother to the East Coast so he could donate part of his liver to her (in the success of the fandom auction debsliverlovers)! It was AWESOME.

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

I love living donors with every fiber of my being. Living donation is a lot less invasive than it used to be, but it's still major surgery, and it takes a lot of selflessness to take such a big risk with your own health to help someone else.

[sillygleekt.livejournal.com]

Me: You know stuff about morbid stuff. Well hey, if they fail at being organ donors, they can donate their bodies to the Ohio State Buckeyes.
Patty: You could donate your body to Glee.
Me: A thought I'm sure people have often, in an entirely different context.

1. I love that this conversation took place. So much awesomeness.


2. A relative of hers donated to the Buckeyes? As in the sports teams? Or just OSU med school or something? Because woah, that reads weird.


3. Oh context. Tricky bastard. LMAO

[rm.livejournal.com]

2. Like the med school or something, but her whole family is super into the school and connected to the sports teams and so verbally it is ALWAYS "the Buckeyes" but I too was like "wait, like is the football team going to practice tackling his cadaver?" But no.

[sillygleekt.livejournal.com]

"wait, like is the football team going to practice tackling his cadaver?"

This is a disturbingly hilarious image. There's a zombie spoof in there for sure (insert "Sue Sylvester Shuffle" Glee tie-in here).

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

My top choice would actually be donating my body for forensics research, but I live too far away from any of the "body farms" for their transportation guidelines. It's too bad, because it would be awesome to say, "And after I die, I'm going to Fight Crime!" So it'll probably be a medical school.

Why yes, we have had this discussion in our household. Also whether, assuming one had access to private land and a sympathetic fire marshal, if it would be POSSIBLE to build a sufficiently hot open pyre to just have ash at the end, and not something that looked horrifyingly like Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's remains in Star Wars. Our conclusion was that it would not be easy, thus scotching any hopes for a Jedi funeral for someone we knew, even if it was what she and her widow would have most preferred.

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

You can have a funeral pyre in Crestone, CO (http://www.crestone-end-of-life.org/), and one other place in the US (though I've not been able to find the other one).

Crestone requires that you be a resident of Crestone, Baca Grande, or Moffat for at least three months to qualify for a pyre service. They don't want "death tourists", but rather to keep it for members of the community.

I intend to move there once I reach retirement age - sooner if I am diagnosed with something awful. Any organs that are useful to someone else will be be donated if at all possible, and I intend for what's left to rejoin the Earth properly, as my ancestors did.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I'd read about that. We also had a friend with property in Maine and who was friends with the fire marshal, so actually arranging it wasn't going to be a problem -- the biggest block was "can we do this without horrifying her sister?" and the answer was "probably not," so we opted for a more traditional cremation.

Donating your ex-you.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Intact corneas can almost always be harvested posthumously. Any body can be donated to science or a teaching hospital. And at some point the crash test dummies have to be real.

Re: Donating your ex-you.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

ISTR it was advertised by the organ-donation service that the late great Jerry Orbach donated his corneas to his fellow-New Yorkers.

Re: Donating your ex-you.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

And some people like me who can't donate anything else (e.g. people who have had a metastatic cancer) can still donate corneas.

Re: Donating your ex-you.

[rena-librarian.livejournal.com]

My father is a Lions' Club member (their humanitarian work mostly revolves around schools for the blind/visually impaired and sight restoration) and I got a chance to hear a guest speaker talk on this very subject. Fascinating. There is a fairly brief time window on this, but I don't think it's longer than for major organs.

[arianhwyvar.livejournal.com]

My grandfather donated his body to one of the local medical schools; it was the wrong time of year for the standard thing where each body goes to a first year medical student to study, so he went to a 4th year student instead. The medical school has a memorial service for the families etc of the donors, where they can meet the students and the students can basically say thank you. My father and sister attended and had only good things to say about it. It seems there was a very palpable sense of appreciation, a sort of 'this person was so cool they kept on teaching us things even after they had died.'

[dsmoen.livejournal.com]

Ha!

[snufflesdbear.livejournal.com]

I actually have a friend looking for a body. If you find one laying around. Not weird, studying to be a funeral home embalmer (he ha gotten all A's so far!) Those things cost $1000 each!

[hazyjayne.livejournal.com]

A thought I'm sure people have often, in an entirely different context.

Haha. I suspect they have *cough*