Donor

As featured in ABCTales magazine issue 10:
http://www.etribes.com/document/folder/49388

Today is a very special day. Today is the day that I applied for my very first donor card. This is a good thing because it means that I will be able to help others to live on after my death. That is what it says on the card. Help Others To Live On After Your Death. That is sort of a play on words, like Life After Death which isn’t a really real thing like some people think, but in a way it is because you are literally helping someone to live after your death. But that is very different from Life After Death in an afterlife kind of way.

I went to the hospital and filled in a registration form. You can do that sort of thing online these days but I still prefer the old-fashioned method of going up to a person and saying exactly what it is that I want. That is the sort of person that I am. The lady at the reception desk was very friendly and had a nice smile. As she handed me a form I wondered if she was going to donate her smile. I would like to have a smile like that. One that said Hello! I Sure Hope That You’re Having A Swell Day Today! and really mean it. The form was very straightforward and had to be completed in block capitals and in black biro. I know a lot of people who always get that bit wrong and have to start again with a new form and sometimes they mess up that form and have to start filling in another form only this time they have to be really careful because messing up two forms is careless but messing up three is just ridiculous but I never do because I always write in block capitals and I always write with a black biro because blue biros are the color of faded tattoos and cigarette smoke. This is why my applications are always dealt with promptly.

The form asked me questions like What Is Your Name? and Where Do You Live? and Who Is Your Next Of Kin? and Are You Really Sure You Want To Become An Organ Donor? and Which Organs Do You Want To Donate? I ticked the box that said All because that is what I wanted. There are people out there who won’t donate their eyes but that is just silly because nobody needs their eyes when they’re dead and somebody else could really use them. Like that man I sometimes see at the bus stop who never fails to get the right bus. Sometimes people amaze me. The man at the bus stop can have my eyes for sure although I would like him to know that there are two floaters in the left one. They drive me crazy sometimes, especially when I’m napping in a sunbeam which is something I like to do often and all I can see are two little specks drifting around only they’re not centered, they’re slightly above and to the right and whenever I try to look at them which it is almost impossible not to do they scamper away like nervous mice determined not to be caught and when I look away they creep back up on me which makes it really hard to sleep. If the man at the bus stop likes to nap in sunbeams then my eyes are probably not for him. I made a note of this on the form so that nobody can say they didn’t have fair warning and then the doctors and nurses and friendly ladies at reception won’t have to deal with complaints from people who can’t stop looking at the damn specks in their eyes.

If you tick the box that says I Would Like To Donate All My Organs like I did then that is a lot of organs to donate. I should point out that it is not like a thrift store or a jumble sale kind of donation. That would be gross and really unhygienic. No, what they do is remove your organs, your eyes, your liver, your kidneys and so on and they put them in a jar and when a person needs an organ they pull it from the shelf and say Here You Go! That is how I imagine it to work anyway. I tried to think of all the organs in my body. There are my eyes of course, and kidneys and liver like I said just before. Then there is the heart, the spleen, the appendix, the intestine, the ears, the tongue, the tonsils except that I don’t have any tonsils because they were removed when I was fourteen. My mom said that it was probably because I had been kissing all the girls at school which was not true because even at fourteen I knew I liked boys the way other boys liked girls even though I hadn’t done any kissing with anyone, not until I was like seventeen and even then it wasn’t such a big deal and I thought it was kind of icky too especially when Joseph Caramello stuck his tongue in my ear and started wiggling it all about like it was some sort of ice-cream. I should probably make a note of that too. That my ears have been licked by someone’s tongue as if they were ice-cream. A person might not want ears that have had that happen to them. I’m sure Joseph Caramello’s tongue was pretty clean but still, you know? Yuck!

Thinking about it, I’m not sure you can donate things like your tongue or your intestine or your appendix. Who would want an appendix anyway? I’ve never heard of someone having a burst appendix and then having a donated one re-fitted. The appendix is useless, everyone knows that. Apart from cows who actually use them but we’re not at the stage where we’re trading organs with livestock just yet so I don’t think I need to worry about that. Pretty much everything else is useful though, even your tonsils although I don’t actually know what they do. When I was younger I heard someone describe kissing as Tonsil Tickling and when I was seventeen and wrestling on the floor with Joseph Caramello in his parent’s basement I tried to stick my tongue far enough down his throat to do that but he ended up gagging and he got really mad at me so I ran home and cried but it was okay because later on that night he came to my house and stroked my hair and rubbed my arms and told me it was okay and it was kind of funny when you think about it and I got all embarrassed again and then he proceeded to lick my ear like it was ice-cream like I said earlier which I think was far worse than me sticking my tongue all the way down his throat even though neither of us gagged when he did it.

I just asked the lady with the nice smile on reception. She said that the kind of things you can donate are things like corneas (not eyes), the heart, intestines (!), the pancreas, the kidneys, the lungs. You can also donate tissue from skin and veins and stuff. I wish I could donate everything. I keep in shape and I don’t abuse my body or anything so it wouldn’t be like I was giving a stereo to the thrift store that didn’t work or that could only receive three staticky radio channels. That happened to me once. I wasn’t happy but I didn’t want to take it back to the store because what would they do with it? What kind of person does that sort of thing anyway? Probably the sort of person who wouldn’t donate any of their organs or might donate some of their organs but would say something like Not My Eyes Because The Eyes Are The Windows Of The Soul which is such a stupid thing to say because there isn’t any such thing as the soul and even if there were why on earth would it need something like a window? Joseph Caramello thought souls were real things and when I told him that I didn’t he got really upset and he said that if I didn’t believe in souls then how could we be soulmates and I said that we weren’t soulmates we were just two people who loved each other very much which I thought was pretty damn wonderful. He didn’t think so and he left me, possibly to find a soulmate who did believe in souls and who wouldn’t mind having his ears licked like they were a tub of Ben & Jerry‘s Phish Food which was his favorite. Joseph Caramello would never donate his eyes to anyone because he believes in souls but I think that is a huge loss because his eyes are the most brilliant blue, like the icy oceans of the north and the south and when I looked into them I would drown.