Rafaelito Martínez has been a volunteer and assistant police officer for twenty years. He now he hopes that someone will give him a gift to continue living.
“I hope someone can help me,” he told us about the biggest battle he has ever faced.
Rafaelito was born in New York to Puerto Rican parents but is more comfortable in English.
It’s painful, he added. Three weeks ago he entered the waiting list to find a liver donor after being diagnosed with cirrhosis.
When he heard the diagnosis he was confused because he has never been a heavy drinker.
The doctors explained that the cause of his problem was linked to obesity and diabetes.
When he was 25 years old he weighed 300 pounds and had diabetes. Since then she has maintained a diet low in carbohydrates and sugars. In the almost twenty years she has lost 100 pounds.
There is an epidemic of people with fatty liver in the United States, said Dr. Thomas Schiano, Medical Director of Mount Sinai Hospital, where organ transplants have been performed since 1998.
Cirrhosis of the liver is the number nine cause of death in the United States.
If they don’t have a transplant quickly, many of these patients die waiting.
According to the doctor, about 15 percent of patients waiting for a liver transplant die before receiving it.
The wait for an organ from a non-living donor is one to two years, but if he finds a living donor, the doctor says he must go through a screening process to see if he is a match.
As for the cost, according to statistics from the ‘National Foundation for Transplants’ organization that raises funds for organ transplants, the cost of a liver transplant is more than 160 thousand dollars.
Sometimes I wonder what I’ve done wrong if all I do is help people, says Rafaelito.
For now, she is waiting for a donor so that she can continue as a volunteer or auxiliary police officer, take care of her family and finish fixing up her father’s house.
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