Episode 17: The Gift of Eye and Tissue Donation with Robert Winter

During episode 17 of This Thing Called Life podcast, host Andi Johnson speaks with Robert Winter, a man that has worked in the field of eye and tissue donation for over twenty-five years. Though it’s difficult, Robert and his team do their best to comfort grieving families while educating them on the benefits of donating!

 

Episode Highlights: 

• There is a lot of misinformation about organ donation that exists because of a mistrust of the healthcare system.
• Robert has been in the field of tissue donation for over twenty-five years.
• The medical field has been a strong interest of Robert’s for his entire life because it provides the opportunity to help people.
• Robert has noticed that everyone in his field shares a common interest in wanting to make a positive difference.
• The most life-saving gift for tissue donation is one of the human-skin graphs for burn victims.
• Jason Schechterle suffered third and fourth-degree burns as a police officer in Phoenix when his car exploded after getting hit.
• The details of Jason’s survival came down to seconds of circumstances and now he shares his story all over the country.
• Hearing the stories of burn victims and survivors gives people perspective on just how important tissue donation is.
• Danny Happy suffered his burn injuries as a ten-year-old and spent months in acute care, receiving over two-hundred feet of skin that saved his life.
• Robert and his team are approaching families on one of the worst days of their lives.
• Being able to express that tissue donations are going to help someone down the road is necessary when talking to families that have lost a loved one.
• Families who have lost a loved one are burdened with making a lot of decisions and dealing with the decisions of their loved one.
• The knowledge that their loved one is going to save someone’s life brings some sort of comfort to grieving families.
• There are many stories of competitive athletes being able to return to their respective sports as a result of tissue donations.
• AlloSource acts as step two of a three-step process by preparing tissue donations to be used in a surgical environment. 
• A disconnect exists between medical practitioners and the origin of tissue donations for their patients.
• Great joy can be brought to donor families by hearing back from those that have received the donation.
• It’s very challenging to deal with families who have gone through an extreme loss on a day-to-day basis.
• Sometimes, families refuse to donate regardless of the fact that their loved one made the decision to do so.
• Robert finds that knowing that people’s lives are being saved and dramatically improved is the most rewarding part of his industry.
• Focusing on the recipients and the donor families makes it easy for Robert to love his job.
• The goal of organ and tissue donation must be to educate as many people as possible.

3 Key Points:

1. Burn patients are very susceptible to infection and thermal regulation, making human-skin graphs incredibly vital to their survival.
2. Jason Schechterle and Danny Happy are both motivational speakers who survived their burn injuries as a result of life-saving tissue donation.
3. One of the difficulties with expressing the benefits of tissue donation to grieving families is that it could be a long time before the positive effects are felt from the donation.

Resources Mentioned:

• LifeCenter Cincinnati  | Website | Facebook| Instagram| Twitter | YouTube |
• Survivor Stories  |Jason Schechterle | Danny Happy
• AlloSource
• The American Association of Tissue Banks