John Roberts Quotes

There is a risk of death associated with donating a piece of liver. It's about one in 500 for the risk of death. The risk of death of donating a kidney is about one in 3000, so this is a riskier operation than donating a kidney. The stakes are usually higher for the recipient of the transplant because unlike kidney failure, where you have a dialysis machine, in liver failure we don't have that kind of machine that allows a patient to survive until they can get a cadaver organ.

Five to six thousand people die every year waiting for organs, but nobody cares.

I had to have a complete liver transplant.

I had to have a complete liver transplant. I waited with a beeper for a year and 10 months to get that gift.

I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'

The difficulty of finding organs suitable for transplantation on man must be met.

Pretty much everybody knows there are not enough organs for all of those patients who need to get transplants, and what happens is, is that organs are actually directed in liver transplantation to those patients who are the sickest. So the patients who have the greatest chance of dying in the next three months or so are the ones who get the priority for the liver transplant.

We are always in awe of what the donors have done in terms of providing of themselves to the recipients. It really is a heroic act because people take on themselves not only a risk of death but also pain-and-suffering in order for their loved one to get the benefit of the liver transplant.

My MELD score was pretty high. And the worse you get on that scale, the sooner you get a transplant. It's based on how sick you are. And believe me, I was pretty sick.

Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes minorities and the poor. Its celebrity spokesman is blue-collar comedian George Lopez, who received a kidney from his wife.

The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.

I think you should automatically donate your organs because that would turn the balance of organ donation in a huge way. I would donate whatever anybody would take, and I'd probably do the cremation bit.

As a child, I had no interest in science whatsoever - then I started writing and recognized how relevant it was. My first book about science and medicine captured the world of organ transplantation in 1989 from the points of view of all of the participants - scientists, surgeons, social workers, organ recipients and even donor families.

I'm just really, really thankful. I'm thankful to the doctors; I'm thankful to the family that donated the kidney.

A lot of people want to donate a kidney, but they're not in a position to because they have health issues of their own, and a lot of people need them. That's why the list is long and it takes a long time.

Who transplanted sustains

For what would it signify to risk our possessions and shed our blood to set ourselves free from the encroachments and oppression of Great Britain—with a certainty as soon as peace was settled with them of a more lasting war, a more unnatural, more bloody, and much more hopeless war, among the colonies themselves? Some of us consider ourselves as acting for posterity at present, having little expectation of living to see all things fully settled and the good consequences of liberty taking effect. But how much more uncertain the hope of seeing the internal contests of the colonies settled upon a lasting and equitable footing?

Blood is one of the things that made fights cool. Like, you knew it had gotten serious. I understand why we don't do it anymore.

No gloves cut a bit more, but that's not a problem if you don't fear blood.

I was in kidney failure. I ended up having a kidney transplant on my 21st birthday.

I understand why my mum and my wife can't bear to watch me fight. There's a lot of blood, a lot of pain.

My dad gave me one of his kidneys.

I've had at least a couple botched surgeries.

Obviously I tell myself I'm more than happy for everything that's been given to me. But if I wake up one morning and my kidney decides 'I don't fancy it today', I'm back to square one.

I got a piece of a dead person's ligament in my body.