Monday, October 4, 2010

"Professional Volunteer?"


So, I have "moved up in the ranks" of volunteering (I got a REAL badge!) and now I get to run around the hospitals with the paid donor service lesions (the people that work for the organ procurement agencies-the people that meet with the donor families or schedule training event dealing with organ donation for hospitals). We only got through a very small part of Santa Clara's HUGE county hospital and an even smaller part of Santa Clara Regional Hospital, but I learned so much today. It was great to be there today for so many reasons:
Many hospital workers had never met a recipient: Even people that directly deal with donor deaths had never met a recipient, so I think it was nice for them to finally see that they were actually doing something, that the organs and tissue were actually getting somewhere.
I learned more about CTDN and how they acquired the tissue bank and more about tissue banking: CTDN is a very complex network and there is so much going on with it that there is always more to learn. Thankfully Mina was training a new hire, so we were both learning the ropes. This is good for me because I think I would like to work for something like CTDN one day and it gives me experience with it. It is getting me out in the hospitals and familiar with the hospitals, and I already know when to call CTDN, which is more than I can say for some experienced nurses. Did you know CTDN does an audit of hospitals to see if the hospital staff missed possible donors. I also learned more about tissues donation. There is all this hype about organ donation because it saves lives, but tissues donation also saves lives and I just learned more about that side of donation.
Hot Doctors: We all agreed the ED has the best (looking doctors, and friendliest! doctors). Since two out of the three of us not married and would be perfectly fine with marring a doctor, we decided me must visit the ED of every hospital-for an extended stay. Infact, we got invited to the Halloween party of one hospitals.
New Friend/Good Conversations: There was LOTS of driving and LOTS of traffic, so it was good that everyone was so open, friendly, and talkative, sometime those kinds of rides can be sooo awkward! I got to hear Kari's liver transplant story-she was transplanted when she was 9 years old! And I finally got to hear Mina's husbands story. That was such an emotional story. Sometimes hearing a story like that makes you wonder how someone can get through life. Mina has been going to school for counseling, going through what she has gone through she is so in-tune with the transplant world and our talk was better than any and all the therapy sessions I have had combines from all my transplant career.

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