Column Chronicles: My speech to the National Organ Donors Association

My speech to the National Organ Donors Association

Frank Cotolo
October 17, 2019

One of my many sideline jobs is public speaking. Recently, I was hired to give a speech to the National Organ Donors Association (NODA) which met in Chicago, Illinois. In a convention hall seating over a thousand members, I took the stage on behalf of NODA's administration to welcome everyone and host the proceedings. Here is the text of the speech.

Good evening and good afternoon and good morning, whatever time zone you are currently experiencing.

I know all of you have come to this meeting of NODA with internal parts of yourselves that you will generously donate to people in need of them. Of course some of you will be dead when you do that, so let me say a quick goodbye to those now and give a warm thank you for your contribution to helping someone else keep on living.

But many of you will survive your donation. If you give a kidney, for instance, while you are alive and you have another kidney that you keep or if you give a lung and have another one to keep, you get the idea. This is, of course, barring complications.

However, a recent NODA study reveals that complications from donating organs are way down and most people live. That should get us many more donors, so make sure you pass that word around to friends and family.

NODA never has enough members. Even as I speak now, someone somewhere is in need of a heart or a pancreas or a liver or a lung. It seems there are more people alive and needing organs than there are organs.

NODA would like to end that but NODA can only do so much.

Soon, say researchers, we will be adding the brain to the donation list. So things are looking up. Imagine that? A person will die and his or her brain will be donated to another person who is close to being dead. That means, I think, that the donor will live on in the body of the person that needed the brain. It's the ultimate merger of humanity, one that was once thought of as the work of mad scientists. So you see, things are looking up.

Okay, the catering is prepared so everyone enjoy your dinner and welcome to the NODA meeting.

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.