Become an organ donor

Dear Annie: Please help me bring awareness and education about organ donation. There are thousands of people waiting for a transplant and hundreds of others awaiting replacement of a previously transplanted organ. Many organ recipients outlive the longevity of their transplant.

Please tell your readers that living organ donors offer better longevity than organs from a cadaver donor. Finding donors promptly is also less expensive and much better health-wise.

In recent years, a great deal has changed with transplants for both the recipient and living donors; i.e. kidney transplants are now being done laparoscopically, and recuperation for the donor now averages only two weeks.

Potential recipients use every resource available, but don’t always find a match.

Please ask readers to help. Sadly, our family knows the importance of this from personal experience.

Lawrence, Kan.

Dear Lawrence: So many people are on waiting lists for organs, we hope our readers will consider living organ donation. People may not realize that they can donate one of their two kidneys, or even one of two lobes of their liver. They also can donate part of a lung, the pancreas or the intestines because the remaining portions stay fully functional. And finally, living donors can donate skin, bone, blood, marrow, blood stem cells and umbilical cord blood after childbirth and certain surgical procedures, such as hip or knee replacement. Organ donors are not charged, although sometimes there are other costs, such as travel expenses. For more information on organ donation, check out organdonor.gov. For financial assistance, contact livingdonorassistance.org.

Dear Annie: When I was growing up, women’s magazines used to give advice on how to avoid being harmed by predatory men. Now they give advice on ways to please a man. There’s an old saying, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” If women want to marry a good man and raise a family, they shouldn’t have sex until after marriage.

When my daughter was 16, she asked whether it was OK to sleep with a man if he says he loves you. I said no, he would lose respect for her. She didn’t listen.

Now she is living with a man who says she is his “partner.” They just had a child. It turns out he is married to another woman, and they have a toddler.

My daughter has fallen for the old line that he’ll marry her once his wife divorces him.

Women should ask themselves what they get out of hooking up and shacking up. Nothing.

If you want the best from a man, don’t settle for a low-class bum who won’t commit.

A Wiser Gramma Who Knows Men

Dear Gramma: Your opinions have merit, but they are based on the ideas that all men lie to get women to sleep with them, and that women use sex as a lure for marriage. This isn’t necessarily true. Young women can enjoy sex as much as men do and don’t want to hold off until marriage, which nowadays may not happen until a woman is in her 30s, if it happens at all. But you are absolutely right that if a woman wants a legal commitment, she should not be shacking up with a married man. And vice versa.

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