THERE IS ONE REAL GOOD REASON WHY YOU SHOULD LOVE YOUR LIVER 4 LIFE………

Apart from respecting the body that you were born with, and looking after it as best you can...the health of your vital organs should be paramount and right at the top of your list. Why? Well, quite simply, most of us would like to live a full and happy life, and to get as many years under our belts as possible. And…yes, I hear a lot of you saying “quality” rather than “quantity”; and I would whole heartedly agree, because life is for living and having lots of fun, love and laughter along the way. When someone’s life may be cut short, due to them needing a new liver, they would hope that a liver would become available to them, and that their life would be saved. However, as we are all well aware, the brutal fact is that in order to save a life in this way, someone else has to lose their life. If a liver is made available for transplant, it is matched to the recipient by size and blood group, and if it is a very healthy and problem free liver then that makes it all the better, in respect of giving the recipient the best chance possible. That all sounds very straightforward doesn’t it, but just imagine if there wasn’t a suitable liver available, and it was your child, spouse, or parent, that was laying there...just waiting. What would you do? What could you do? Well…you may be approached by the medical team to be asked if ‘you’ or another family member (or close friend), would consider donating part of your own liver. And…. as hard and as difficult a question that may be to ask, it is a question that possibly would be posed to you. No doubt, most of us would jump up to nominate ourselves to go through with this, and to hope that our blood group would be compatible, because if there was any chance at all to save a life, it would be worth taking that chance. Obviously, lots of tests have to be undertaken, and at the end of that process, you would like to be told that the resection for a live liver donation could go ahead. So…imagine if things didn’t go so well with the testing, and you were told that your liver wasn’t very healthy, but ‘yes’ they could still plan the procedure…however ‘ideally’ the liver should be in a better condition to enable the recipient to have the best possible outcome. OR… to be told that you had liver disease and that it WAS NOT appropriate or possible for you to donate part of your liver. How would you feel to be told this? I guess that it would be at this time, and this time alone, that you would give yourself a big kick, and wish that you’d looked after your body a bit better. For those who’ve unfortunately inherited a serious liver condition, (or naively contracted a virus), and therefore wouldn’t be in a position to offer part of your liver, it would be ‘bad luck’ (and out of your control), but for all those who have incurred a poorly, sub-standard liver due to their lifestyle, it is ‘TOTALLY bad luck’. Therefore, the moral of my message is, quite purely...please look after your liver. You never know when someone else may need a bit of it. For further information regarding organ donation and to sign up to the register, please click on the following link: https://www.organdonation.nhs.uk/how_to_become_a_donor/registration/consent.asp For further information on optimising your liver health, contact me on L4L's helpline on 08000 74 34 94.