Life and surgery: The long day's journey of a kidney transplant patient

Chicago Muckrakers | By YanaKunichoff
Jorge Mariscal has been on dialysis for the past seven years and takes a myriad of pills everyday for his condition. With only one kidney left, he undergoes dialysis which takes a toll on him making him feel fatigue and usually just stays home because he can not do any extraneous activity. Photo by Lucio Villa

This is the story behind the story of how Lucio Villa, a photojournalism fellow at The Chicago Reporter, was there the night undocumented immigrant Jorge Mariscal got his long-needed kidney transplant. Mariscal's story, and others, will be featured in a photography exhibition, "Issues Visualized," opening Thursday, June 20.

By Lucio Villa

I met Jorge Mariscal in June 2012. I had just started my summer internship at The Chicago Reporter, and I was assigned to follow the hunger strike in Little Village. A group of mothers, including Sonia Lopez, Mariscal’s mother, were demanding organ transplants be allowed for the undocumented.

Mariscal had just lost one kidney to cancer, and his second one was malfunctioning. But he could not be put on the organ transplant list because of his immigration status.

I was going back to the Little Village church at least twice a week to check up on the hunger strike and document the process. After a while, everyone got to know me and referred me as “el joven de Los Angeles,” or “the young man from Los Angeles.”
______________________________________________________ 
"You have the power to SAVE lives." 
To register as a donor in California: 
www.donateLIFEcalifornia.org | www.doneVIDAcalifornia.org 
Outside California: 
www.organdonor.gov | www.donatelife.net


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Heart transplant recipient celebrates graduation with donor’s mom

Image
A.J. Reyes, right, talks with Mary Knauer prior to a graduation ceremony for Samuel Merritt University nursing program students in Oakland, Calif. on Friday, May 26, 2017. Knauer's son was killed in a motorcycle crash in 2010 and Reyes received his heart in an organ transplant. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News Group) At 25, AJ Reyes was suffering from congestive heart failure and running out of time. Unless the Vallejo resident got another organ to replace his damaged one, his doctors told him he would be dead within five years. Reyes went on the California Transplant Donor Network waiting list and in November of 2010, he got the call that he had been praying for. A strong, healthy heart had become available. But his joy was clouded by the knowledge that the news meant another family’s nightmare. Justin Olivera, a 40-year-old man from Willows, a small rural town in Northern California, had just been killed in a motorcycle accident. Olivera was an organ donor, and his heart...
Read more

The Kidney Crisis

Image
Hour Detroit Magazine | By Monica Mercer // Photographs by Josh Scott Myths about organ donation and transplantation are still contaminating the real issues behind a silent health problem Dr. Alan Koffron can conjure scene after scene from the medical TV genre where human kidneys have been integral to the plot: residents dropping them on the floor, crooked doctors profiting from organ trafficking, the wrong kidney placed in the wrong body. Kidney transplantation â€" the most commonly performed of all transplant procedures in the world â€" ranks high on the medical dramatics scale, Koffran says, but he’s not sure why. An organ transplantation surgeon with Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Koffron has performed thousands of kidney transplants. He and the other medical professionals involved in the process across the country know how heavily regulated it is in the United States, with checks and balances so strong that rarely does a kidney transplant involve any- thing remotely a...
Read more

Hawthorne woman's liver donation saves cousin, the 'big sister' she never had

Image
North Jersey | Lindy Washburn CARMINE GALASSO/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Jennifer Carrino, left, and cousin Nina Walsh showing off their surgery scars. Nina donated a portion of her liver to her older cousin, likely saving her life. Over the last year, Jennifer Carrino had come back from the brink of death, survived internal bleeding and spent weeks in intensive care. Then came the hard part: asking her cousin for a part of her liver. In April, doctors told Jennifer that without a transplant she probably had a year to live. Jennifer, 37, was already on transplant waiting lists in two states, but it was going to take too long, they said. She needed to think about a living donor. Jennifer turned to her younger cousin, Nina Walsh, a slip of a woman with an outsized sense of generosity. She asked her to consider giving up part of her healthy liver. The procedure, pioneered 20 years ago, pushes the ethical boundaries of medicine because it goes against a basic tenet of medicine to “first do no ha...
Read more