Would you donate half of your liver to keep your father alive?
What if your father were an alcoholic?
What if you had a difficult relationship with him?
Mark Foster faced all these questions and more in The High Price of Keeping Dad Alive (Wall St Journal)
The decision to surrender a piece of a liver can be an affirmation of love and selflessness. As Mark Foster and his parents discovered, it also can be an agonizing choice for the donor and recipient, one that forces families to confront tensions they might have preferred remain dormant.
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For decades, almost all organs used in transplants came from deceased donors. But as the operations have become more routine, the number of available organs is falling far short of demand. As a result, living donations have tripled in the past decade to about 7,000 a year, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees transplants in the U.S.
Liver donations make up more than 300 of that number, with a close relative the typical beneficiary.