Full-time volunteer Gao Min. [Photo/szqgjx.org]

Forty-five-year old Gao Min came to Shenzhen from Shandong province 14 years ago. Since 1997, she has donated more than 120 thousand cc of blood for free.

Gao is now a voluntary tissue and organ donation coordinator for the Red Cross Society of China Shenzhen Branch. Her work is to help arrange tissue and organ transplants.

When I phoned Gao to arrange for an interview in the afternoon, she hesitated, saying she would be contacting tissue donors and their family members by then, so we talked on the phone for forty minutes before she became busy.

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The first call on tissue donation she received came from a mother who had lost her daughter in a traffic accident in 2005. The mother expressed her wish of donating her daughter's tissue and organs. Gao met her in the hospital, made sure she signed an agreement of donation. The donation included the girl's liver, kidneys and cornea, which in turn healed three people.

In China, only qualified hospitals are allowed to conduct tissue and organ transplants, yet they are prohibited from removing tissues or organs of a dead body unless the donor's immediate relatives and spouse have signed an agreement with Red Cross Society of China. As a result, Gao sometimes has to try to persuade family members of patients who passed away to agree on the donation, and help hospitals conduct a timely transplant.

"When there is a brain dead patient or a patient whose condition is beyond the medical treatment capacity, and his/her relatives called me. I rush to the hospital, consulting the doctor in charge, and then making sure that the patient's parents, children and spouse, if there's any, agree on such donation."

Often the job is tough. Gao recalled with emotion some of the donation cases she was involved in. She couldn't hold her tears when she saw how family members of a patient suffering brain death made "an extremely difficult decision" to agree to donate his cornea in 2008.

The patient's wife gave birth to a baby girl the next morning. Doctors carried her to her father's bed to bid him farewell. "I was overwhelmed by emotion, just watching the beginning and the end of lives at the same time," Said Gao.

The youngest donor was a three-hour old baby. The parents would like to donate it for medical research. "The baby looked asleep, if you ignored the blood on its lips," Gao slowed down and lowered her voice, though she believed tissue and organ donation helps to continue and renew lives.

Her belief is not shared by all. There were parents who refused to sign on the donation agreement, and children who said they would never allow removal of their parents' body parts.

"It's hard to change the thousand-year-old funeral tradition, where people deem cutting a dead body as utter impiety," Gao said, "hopefully with medical and living standard development, and promotion work, more people will accept tissue and organ donation." After all, "Death is the rule of nature."

On the other hand, she hopes China's law on tissue and organ transplant will become more sound and humane, thus make it easier for family members afflicted with loss of loved ones, and reduce risks which hospitals are reluctant to take.

Click for the story of Yuan Shuping, a nurse caring for those at life's end