Importance of Grief counseling and Attitude of deceased persons family members towards organ donation !!!
There are lot of things to share as a transplant coordinator. As far as concerned to Transplant coordinator, while working in hospital i have counseled more than 70 familes through a year of cadaveric death. For a transplant coordinator, there is lot of importance of grief counseling of relatives of deceased persons relatives.Although grief counseling and organ donation are two different things, it is always asked for organ donation at the last stage of grief i.e. acceptance. Good effective counseling always lead to successful organ and tissue donation.
I have successfully done more than 20 cases for tissue donation and body donation while working as a transplant coordinator at Sassoon Hospital,Pune. As I told , grief counseling play vital role in organ donation process, i have seen some cases in which i didn’t need counseling, i have seen such families with positive attitude towards organ donation. I will share both cases of showing importance of grief counseling and and attitude of family members towards organ donation and also the cases in which people themselves came to me for donating tissues. In this blog i want to elaborate the importance of grief counseling and positive behaviour of people in that process and also to show how some people are optimistic about organ donation that they really want to to do something for social cause. Here I am briefing few of my experiences :
Case 1) Body Donation in Sassoon after the death of a doctor to study medical students :
‘While studying medicine, I learned the intricacies of slicing someone’s body and all the internal organs. So I became a doctor (surgeon). Just as I was able to acquire knowledge by learning from someone else’s body, so should future doctors learn from my body and acquire better knowledge and serve patients’.
The name of the deceased doctor is Dr. Prabhakar Narhar Revanwar (age 79, native of Pusad, Yavatmal, now resident of Balewadi). Dr. Revanwar has maintained his loyalty to the medical profession and society even after his death by donating his body for medical students.
Dr. Revanwar passed away on 23rd January and on the same day his son Shrikrishna Revanwar and his family performed their duties by donating their body. His body will be used to train trainee doctors. After the death, the body was donated to someone’s education without burning it in the traditional way. The sacrifices and decisions of Revanwar and his family are being welcomed in the medical field.
Dr. Prabhakar Rewanwar and his family are originally from Pusad in Yavatmal district. He did his MBBS in Government Medical College, Jabalpur. He later earned an MS (Surgeon) degree. So, all my life I practiced medicine in Yavatmal. However, he served the poorest patients from a humanitarian point of view. So, for the last 7 years he had to live with the boy in Pune. His son Shrikrishna is an engineer and resides in Pune.
Dr. Revanwar had prepared the will 20 years ago. In it, he has written about body donation. ‘While studying medicine, I learned from someone’s dead body. Based on that knowledge, I was able to perform thousands of operations on almost all the organs in the living body. This made me realize how ‘immortal’ the ‘value’ of this body is. Future doctors should learn about my body and acquire better knowledge and serve the patients. Revanwar has mentioned in his will. Also save at least 1-2 quintals of wood for burning one of my corpses. He also said that pollution of the environment should be avoided.
During my lifetime, my father faithfully practiced medicine and served poor patients. He was an ardent devotee of Satyasai Baba. He has never come close to a malpractice like cut practice in the medical field. He has written books on various topics. He has also been honored with various awards for his social attitude.
– Jagdish Borude