Have you ever noticed that the survival rates for major organ transplants often give numbers out to five years, but rarely beyond that?
I sometimes wonder if the quality of life is worth it. You're going to start pretty damned sick or you wouldn't be looking at a transplant; then the time post-op is also very miserable and recovery is often stated in terms of years.
Like half of the rest of your life if five years is often the limit.
Patients getting much past five years must be remarkable because the positive and upbeat sites advocating transplants never remark on it. "Needing a transplant must be depressing enough, so let's not dash their hopes."
A factor in this could easily be that really young people don't often need transplants. Young people (on motorcycles) provide transplants...
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I know that they do five year survival for cancers because by five years, a cancer patient's chance of getting cancer goes down to the same as pretty much everyone's. Could it be the same reasoning for transplants? By five years, their chances of organ failure goes down to background.
ReplyDeleteConsidering the nasty immunosuppressants they put transplant patients on, it's rough to guess.
I remember reading that 5 years is the average tissue replacement time in the human body, so it could be that if the tissue wasn't rejected by then, it was honorary birth tissue.
DeleteTo be fair I read it outside a biology class, so it could be non-science crap, or averaged with stomach lining making a really dumb number.
Ok,my wife had maybe 45 -60 days to live when she got her transplant. If I get 5 years, I'll take it. We've been together27 years and I'm not ready to let her go. Yeah, I'm broke and in hock to the gills, but I've got my wife. And yes,it was down to days.I'll take it.
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