Spreading the Love-in more ways than one

I have decided and I'm sure that the wording of this post will change many times over the course of this new project of mine. But, I am just going to dig in as I feel that is what God is telling me to do. In a dream last night I came up with a plan to share about organ donation. In my dream I had it fully planned out how I was going to write this post and which pictures I was going to post and the good that I was going to do. But, somehow in the waking up and doing the mom duties, it got lost in my brain and the coffee still has yet to drag my thoughts back to me.

The basics--there are plenty of organs to go around. The problem, not enough people are donating those organs when they die and the organs are being buried. The why--they didn't obtain and sign a donor's registration card and so when they died their family didn't know what they wanted and since they had just lost a family member, it was too hard of a decision to make and therefore they didn't make it and what could have been a lifesaving organ for someone was instead buried in the ground. As of today there are 102,019 people waiting for a lifesaving transplant of some organ. My son is 1 out of those 102,019 people. Statistically 30-50% of these people will die before they ever get a transplant. For a parent waiting on one of those, those are some pretty scary odds. Now, my son is lucky at the moment (in a sense) because he is only 15 months old. What an odd sentence as how could it be lucky to need a transplant?

He is lucky because he is only 15 months old. Due to his age, he is top priority and will therefore only wait around 6 months for a kidney. When he does this again in 10-15 years, his wait will be 3-5 YEARS. Dialysis in and of itself is risky business. There is the constant threat of infection. Then there is the wonky labs that could possibly harm him. And not even in the top 5 things that I worry about but still in the back of my head is that this will mean that for the majority of his preteen to teen years he will feel sick. That's a long time.

So, I have decided that I need to be the change. I need to advocate for him in the best way I know possible.

I have decided to make this into a contest. Right now I have two gift cards and I would like to give them to people. So, the contest goes like this. You will get one entry for every email, facebook post, blog entry, etc that you send out in which you tell someone that this is the face of organ donation. Organ donation is not just elderly people who have lived out their lives. Organ donation affects little bitty babies and it affects men with families in their 30s and it affects elderly grandparents as well. My gift cards are not much yet but I'm hoping through donations and God touching people's hearts to make this into something much bigger than just me and my blog. My goal is to inform 1000 people about organ donation and to help them to realize that this affects everyone.

So, get to blogging and emailing and facebook posting. : ) Right now the giftcards are a $10 to Starbucks and a $10 to Best Buy.

I have to go out in a bit so I'm sure this will be reworded when I get home but I felt the need to post this before I my brain totally forgot about the idea. Please let me know if you have any ideas.