Ten years ago, David Manuel was in a life-or-death situation due to liver and kidney failure, and he didn’t know if he would ever see his loved ones again. After apologizing to his family preemptively for not being able to witness them accomplish all of the amazing things in life, a miracle happened. A 21-year-old White male had a seizure, and by the time he was found, there was no oxygen going to his brain. Days later, a nurse came into Manuel’s room to tell him that he would get a liver due to the deceased 21-year-old being a registered organ donor.
Manuel is the director of Fulton County Arts and Culture, but he says his new mission is to make the public aware of the importance of organ donation to save lives. Manuel spoke with rolling out at the Organ Donor Awareness art exhibit about his story, Black donors, and why people should become organ donors.
What do you want people to know about organ donation?
I want people to leave the fear out of it. You can give people gifts, you can buy people houses, cars, or whatever. There’s no better gift you can give anyone than the gift of life.
What I want them to know about my story is that so many people receive a life-saving transplant, but the question is, what do you do after you receive that? I’m getting ready to celebrate my 10th anniversary. I had 10 extended years on my life. Am I making [it] count or am I just going back to work and doing the status quo?
I’m driven and I’m committed to saying that God gave me a second chance in life and I need to be doing something. Sleep is not an option. Rest is not an option until the job is done. I try to make sure that I do my part and also encourage other people to come on board because it’s not an individual task, it’s a group task. We try to save lives, we try to make an impact, not just locally, but on a global level.
Why do Black donors matter?
When you look at the statistics, it seems like it makes more sense for a person who needs a kidney to get a kidney from someone of the same race. I’m a little different because my donor was a White male, but you want your organ to last more than nine years. You got to take care of your body, you got to set it up for the right equation to happen.
A lot of times when we start supporting our own, we start registering to be an organ donor, then now we can bring that list down because over 22 people die every day waiting on a life-saving organ and 60 percent of them are African American and Hispanic. We need the organ, but we don’t want to register to be organ donors.
What do you say to that person who’s unsure about being an organ donor?
You need to find out the reason why they don’t want to donate organs because if they talk to any funeral home director, that director is going to tell them they remove the organs, we put them in a plastic bag, we discard them.
Why wouldn’t you give somebody a life-saving organ? The organ you give might be [to] the next president, it might be [to] the next person to cure cancer, it might be [to] the next art director, which for me it was. Giving the gift of life again is the most exciting, most precious, and most thoughtful thing that you can do.
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