Celina Espinoza: Hello. My name is Celina Espinoza and I am the External Affairs Director at New Mexico Donor Services and I'm so thankful you're listening today and that I get to share information about organ donation with you. My organization, New Mexico Donor Services, you may also know us as Donate Life New Mexico, is the local non profit that makes organ donation happen in our state.

So we service the entire state of New Mexico, about two million people, and we have a really amazing Donate Life program at San Juan Regional and you guys have done amazing things when it comes to organ donation. This past year, you set a record for organ donation. Eight donor heroes saved 23 lives. And when we look at that across the country, and even in our state, 23 lives, means 23 people who are able to have more time with their families, able to take their culture and enhance their communities, really just make an impact by a life saving gift given by a donor hero.

We appreciate and really truly thank each and every one of those donor heroes and their families. And it's amazing to think about the legacy that that person has left behind through the gift of a life saving organ for somebody who's waiting for a transplant.

Organ donation can be really difficult to think about. It's a really hard thing to have to think about of letting a loved one go, but yet an impactful legacy that you can have as a donor hero. One organ donor can save up to eight lives. You can donate your heart. Your lungs can technically be split in half and save two lives. Your liver could be split in half and save two people.

Your kidneys, you have two kidneys, so you can save two people. And you can donate your pancreas and your intestines. A tissue donor can also help heal up to 75 people. And tissue donation is things like skin grafts for burn victims or people going through breast cancer surgeries. Tissue grafts like your corneas can be donated and you can give the gift of sight.

Bone grafts. For a bone to heal, all that has to happen is two pieces of that bone have to be touching, and then the body can go in and calcify and complete that bone. So you can help heal somebody who has a really bad break, or even some dental implants or dental surgeries are often come from bone grafts and bone donors.

You can donate your ACL or your rotator cuff tendons, heart valves. Heart valves are often used to help heal babies who are born with birth defects. And so they'll go and take that adult heart valve and put it into a baby who has a defect and then that baby's able to live and thrive the rest of their life.

So it's just a truly amazing gift that you can give by being an organ donor. It's also really important that you have that conversation with your family, that they would know whether you would say no or would say yes, because they might have to make that decision for you. Our non profit does wraparound services, so when we get notified by a hospital that somebody's passed in a way that makes donation possible, which means that you've had some sort of injury, usually a brain injury, maybe a fall off of a motorcycle or a drowning, something where there's no more oxygen to the brain or the brain is badly damaged.

The medical professionals get you to the hospital and you're on a breathing machine and some life saving or life continuing type measures, and it's determined that your body's there, but you're no longer present. Then it's up to our organization to work with the family to follow next steps.

If you're registered, then we know what you would have wanted. So if you've gone to the MVD and you have a little heart on your driver's license, you said, yes, I want to be an organ donor, we know what you would have said had we been able to ask you. If you're not registered, we then work with the next of kin to figure out what they would want to have happen, what they think you would have wanted to have happen.

And then we walk them through that scenario and we're able to support them through it. We then find the medical teams and organize the medical teams, which is amazing at San Juan to be able to do the procurement surgery and then figure out where those organs are going per the national wait list. And so sometimes that's us putting a kidney on a pump and sending it to California.

Or we recently have partnered with Oklahoma at San Juan to do two, what we call extended hope livers. And they're able to send in their pumps, put a liver on a pump and be able to figure out where that recipient would go and take that liver to the recipient to help save their life. After that, we then do aftercare services with the family, help with grief counseling, support them through an ambassador program and really know that it's a very hard family to be a part of, but we support you through it in every single way.

And each one of our donor heroes is really important and really special and has saved a life in our community. Last year, New Mexicans saved 207 lives total through organ donation. So we had the second highest year for lives saved through organ donation. The year before that, 95 donor heroes saved 241 lives.

And that's so important because right now across the United States, about 100,000 people are waiting for a life saving transplant. And about 27 people die every single day on that wait list. But 127 lives are saved every single day because someone says yes to organ donation. It's a really special gift.

A lot of the frequently asked questions we get is, I'm too old or I'm too sick. You're never too old or never too sick to become a registered organ donor. The oldest organ donor was 94, and they took his liver and transplanted it into a 30 year old woman. And she lived with that liver for another 30 years.

So that's incredible. It all comes down to the health of your organs. And even if you have cancer or some pre-existing condition, there might be things that you can still donate. So oftentimes you're able to still donate your corneas and help give the gift of sight to someone else. The other misconception we often get is that medical professionals won't work as hard to save my life.

They'll see that little heart, they'll know I'm an organ donor and they'll just be worried about coming and getting my organs. It's actually the opposite. We have to really stabilize a body and it takes us maybe a couple days to figure out where those life saving gifts would go. So we really work hard to keep that person stable, to make sure the body is working properly and, medical professionals, no matter what, are there to save lives, period.

The other one that we get is that you won't be able to have an open casket funeral and you most definitely can. Nobody would ever know that you were an organ or a tissue donor unless your family tells them. So you can still have an open casket and we're able to honor cultural customs. So if there's something that's important to you, we just worked with a Muslim family who that individual had to pass before the sun set, and that was really important to that family.

We follow a lot of Native American cultures and customs because that's a majority of what we serve in our state. So if you have a cultural concern, we're able to work with that family and make follow those customs and help ensure donation happens in a way that makes you comfortable and makes them comfortable. 

If you already have a heart on your driver's license and you've signed up when you've gone to get your driver's license, we just want to say thank you. You're a hero and it makes a huge difference. If you haven't and you'd like to register, you can register anytime. You go to registerme.org and you'll be able to fill out information there. And if you have any questions or you want to get more information, you can visit our website at DonateLifeNM.org. That's DonateLifeNM.org. You can also follow us on social media. We're on Facebook and Instagram. It's the same handle, DonateLifeNM.

And there you can submit questions or DM us and we'll answer all of those questions. So I just want to say thank you for your consideration of being an organ donor, and thank you for saving lives in our community, especially at San Juan, where you had a record number of lives saved this year.