“I was practically dead“They saved me by chance,” says Celso García (Vigo, 1952). He is sitting behind a consultation table at the Nicolás Peña Hospital and is wearing a white coat with a pocket at chest height which is full of ornaments; a donation campaign pin of marrow, a ribbon with a slogan about donating blood, several pens. It looks like the attire of a family doctor, but he holds another position, it is president of Adrovithe Association of Organ Donors and Recipients of Vigo.
Celso García is one of the many people in our country who has managed to get ahead thanks to an organ transplant; in his case, liver. “It was because of the alcohol. As a child I had been burned above my liver and had an atrophied lobe. I started working in construction and then I got into hospitality, worked as a cook and I started going out at night,” he says.
The situation continued until his body said ‘enough’. The operation was complicated and he had to spend 29 days in the ICU (it is normal to spend at most a week after receiving the transplant) and another three months hospitalized, since the treatment they had given him had “atrophied” his bone marrow and he had no defenses. Once outside, Celso He felt like he had been reborn. Of all that It’s been 26 years.
The beginning of Adrovi
“Everything that seemed indifferent to you before, when you get out of a problem like this, you give importance to it. Youeverything seems different to you, everything seems better to you“says the president of Adrovi sitting in what is now the premises of his association, located inside the Nicolás Peña facilities.
If Celso was clear about one thing when he left the hospital, it was that he wanted to help other people. “I’ve done weird things since then.“, he confesses with a laugh; from spending a whole day helping a girl find her lost dog to taking advantage of his recovery time to learn computer science and then occasionally lending a hand in a computer store on Avenida de Fragoso.
The culmination of that desire to help He reached the others in 2008, when he decided to found the Association of Organ Donors and Recipients of Vigo to raise awareness. Adrovi’s work consists of attending to the patient doubts and concerns who are going to undergo the operation, as well as those people who live with a transplanted organ or want to know how to become donors. They are also responsible for disseminating information through talks at schools, stands in shopping centers and other informative activities.
An increasingly aware society
With each passing year the numbers of donors improve. Spain is leading the world in this sense, with a rate of 46.3 donors per million of inhabitants in 2022, according to the Ministry of Health. In Galicia, according to data provided by Sergas, in 2022, 296 organ transplants were carried out, there were 128 donors and 1,986 new donor cards were registered.
Celso García believes that society is aware, but sees a clear difference between cities and rural areas. There “you always find a little more reluctance”, although he also believes that the fact that “many times people don’t care about these things while they don’t touch the family.” Youth, on the contrary, are fully aware of the importance of being a donor in García’s eyes.
The president of Adrovi never tires of highlighting that a single donor can save up to “four or five lives”: “I always say this is a miracle.”. Currently, medical advances allow the use of vital organs and also all types of tissues, such as corneas, bones or skin. According to Sergas data for the year 2022, the list of patients waiting for a transplant It was 253 people; of them, 199 needed a kidney.
Be a donor, be a recipient
But what is he like? process to become a donor? Can anyone donate their organs? Despite growing citizen awareness, the issue is still full of gray areas and there are many doubts that arise among the population. Celso García explains that Becoming a donor is “very easy”: The usual thing is to get the donor card or leave a record of it in the last wills, although for him the most important thing is “talk about it with the family.”
If the family of the deceased person is aware that they wanted to donate, the work of the transplant coordinator It’s much more fluid. This professional is in charge of going to the relatives of the potential donor to request the organs, even if the patient does not have a donor card. “It’s a hard work because each family responds in a different way,” says García, although he admits that “we Galicians usually greatly respect the will of the deceased“. The percentage of families that decided to refuse was 16% in 2022.
“We Galicians tend to greatly respect the will of the deceased”
Despite this majority willingness to be a donor, only “one in 100” is suitable for it. “First of all you have to die in the hospital,” explains the president of Adrovi. For example, accident victims cannot donate if they die on the street. due to the deterioration suffered by the organs in waiting. Patients with diseases that could affect the future recipient are also ruled out.
The transplant process involves the deployment of a operation composed of a hundred professionals coordinated at the national level by the National Transplant Organization (ONT) and where maximum health safety for the recipient and ethics for the donor are maintained. And after the operation, comes the story of hope and improvement of each patient.
“I remember that when I had the transplant We had an average lifespan of 10 years. I’m already 26. Sometimes there are problems, perhaps you may have a rejection, there is no doubt that the patient must take care of himself. But I think you die for another reason before that. I now know for sure that I will die of something else.“Celso García proudly states.
