Page 4 - Healthcare News Nov/Dec 2022

Mark Auerbach says he’s ‘going public’ with his quest for a new kidney to help raise awareness about the importance of organ donations and perhaps shorten the time on the waiting list for some of those in need.
Wait of the World
For Those on the Organ-donation List, MIt’s a Painful Numbers Game
By GEORGE O’BRIEN Soon thereafter, Auerbach, a veteran arts reporter, owner of a public- relations firm that bears his name, and current ArtsBeat reporter for
ark Auerbach says he had started down the Pioneer Valley Radio, joined the lengthy list of people in this country on stairs in his home in Longmeadow that night a waiting list for a donated kidney.
in 2019 when he tripped over an untied shoe- How lengthy? Well, he was accepted into a donor program at Mas- lace and started falling. He recalls knocking sachusetts General Hospital and is now one of roughly 1,400 patients in a bannister out of the railing and slamming a queue waiting for the proverbial ‘right donor.’ Nationwide, there are
through his front door. approximately 100,000 people on such lists.
As a result of the fall, he broke his femur and his hand, eventually While waiting for a kidney, many on those lists choose to be proactive spending more than three months in inpatient rehabilitation. But the and not simply wait. Some buy billboards stating their case, while others
fall did something else. It “fatally injured” one of his kidneys, as he put it, accelerating a process of deterioration that had begun years earlier when he was diagnosed with diabetes.
“In 2019, my kidney doctor said, ‘you are heading for the need for a transplant, and you’re in stage 4; eventually, you’ll be in stage 5, and you’ll need one,” he recalled, adding that stage 5 essentially arrived in the spring of 2021.
take out ads in newspapers and use social-media channels to encour- age people to come forward and donate — not just for them, but for the myriad others waiting for a truly life-changing gift.
Auerbach is one of them. He said he has “gone public” — but in
a quiet way, with personal appeals; regular postings on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter; and interviews like this one and another on his ArtsBeat show with guest (and longtime friend) Patrick Berry, host of
4 WWW.HEALTHCARENEWS.COM NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022