Great news in the California transplant world: California is piloting a donor registry -- at last!

Those of you in other states may already have a donor registry set up (34 states have registries already). This means that when you went to the DMV and signed up to be an organ donor, your intentions were saved in a database and should you ever become brain dead and not have your license on you, the database can be accessed to verify your wishes. Furthermore, if you do have your license on you, the database can be accessed to see if you had any restrictions or specific stipulations.

In California, we filled out wallet-sized cards about our donation intentions and put a pink dot sticker on our licenses, but we had no donor registry. This meant that unless we had that card and/or our license with the pink dot on it at the time of brain death, there was no record of our wishes. That is why it was so important for our family members and friends to know our wishes, because consent would then become the decision of the kin.

Potential donors in California had their card or license on them at the time of brain death less than 10% of the time. Oftentimes people assumed that putting the dot on their license made their wishes clear and thus didn't bother to tell their kin -- and without the license, who knows if their wishes were then carried out.

The Donor Registry resolves many of those issues. Right now it's a website indpendent of the DMV, but we're hoping we can tie it in with them so that people can register to donate when they get their license and/or go to renew it, etc. The California Donor Registry website launches Monday, April 4, 2005 @ 10:00AM with statewide events involving state and local government officials, media, hospitals, volunteer health organizations, churches, and community groups. What's more, CA residents can pre-register as of March 1. If you are one of my friends or family in California and you're reading this, I urge you to join me and all my coworkers and their CA friends and family in pre-registering. I'll be sending out a mass email with the website on it closer to the actual pre-registration date...

...my last message to you on this topic is NOT to assume your state has a registry...make your wishes known to your loved ones regardless of what your state does. It will ensure that you get to give the gift of life no matter what.

p.s. my first day of "flying solo" as Executive Assistant is this Monday, February 14th. I'm taking the fact that I 'start' on Valentine's day as a good omen -- I'm sure I'm going to love my new job. All punning aside, I've been training for the last two days and it's a lot simpler than HR and a whole new kind of interesting -- I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Just wanted to take some time to tell you about the volunteering I'm doing. I sent an email to Mom, Mary, and my old Rumsey Coach, Rick, that pretty much covers it all:

In short, it's awesome. I go from 9am-12pmish on Saturday mornings and basically just play and play and play. It's called "skill drills" and the basic set up is -- arrive at 9am, mess around, play a pick up game of just about anything until 9:30. Then we gather as a group, have an overview of the day's virtue -- one of 9: love, courage, wisdom, faith, hope, respect, self-control...can't remember the other two. It's not religious, just a means of impressing general good citizenship. Then we split off into small groups, where we name ourselves after some theme -- today's was fruits or vegetables, my group (three girls and another volunteer) picked the "Cherry Berry Peaches" :o) -- and get to know each other a little. Then we rotate to different skill stations -- the first week the stations had to do with passing, the second was setting and serving, this week it was positions and scoring -- though there's always a 'free time' station where you go outside and can do whatever you want, and an art station where you draw something to do with that day's virtue. The kids are K-5, which is an energetic bunch and willful but beyond that I'm SO grateful that they haven't hit puberty yet -- which is when the REAL attitude comes out, as I recall!! We do that until about 11:00 when they break out the snacks, and then you can mess around again until about 11:30, when they re-gather to talk about what they've learned, tell 'positive tattles' and give awards -- one for each gender in the volunteers and one for each gender in the kids.

I got the female volunteer award last week. Basically for my group they gave me two of the real rambunctious kids, one the more petulant kids, and then a real sweetheart helper-type kid -- all boys -- all different races, though relatively similar in age. I was pretty cowed at first. They were so aware of who they were assigning to me and the absolute patience I was going to have to have that they said I didn't have to do any of the skill drills -- we could just stay outside where they could run themselves ragged! And it was true -- when I told them, one grabbed a soccer ball, one grabbed a basket ball, one grabbed a volleyball and one grabbed a hoola hoop -- and they promptly scattered to the four compass points!!! They're not real strict about them having to do any one thing, but obviously I need to keep an eye on all of them -- which was a trial itself. Every now and then one would bolt inside without asking -- to use the bathroom or just out of curiosity -- and I was torn between leaving the other three to chase the one down or not knowing where the one was -- but there was always another volunteer who swooped in and helped me out. Justin and Curt -- the two people who run the show -- were impressed with my patience -- as was I, actually, I was able to hang in there all morning without tears, fists, fighting, boo-boos, or true disappearances -- and that was just on my part ;o) -- so they gave me that day's award.

Anyway, as the morning goes by you don't notice how much energy you're expending -- physical AND emotional -- it's only when you finally stop that you realized you're about to collapse -- as I'm sure you all know. I've been astonished the past two weekends at how wrecked I've been -- for the WHOLE weekend -- after volunteering. So this weekend I took matters into my own hands and bought a jamba juice (the name for the local fresh-fruit-smoothie chain) with an energy boost (added vitamins and herbal remedies to lend extra energy) afterwards and it seems to have worked...I was tired but not destroyed!!

So that's how it's going. We have next weekend off due to the holiday and then three more weekends after that, and then after that they switch sports. Since it doesn't actually require a great deal of skill, I might stick with it even when it's basketball or soccer...not sure yet. I'm not shocked at how little giving up a Saturday morning of sleeping in bothers me compared to all the goofy, loud, hopeful, sweet fun that's replaced it.