John Roberts Quotes

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

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.'

This is a year and a few months after the transplant. Before I had it my doctors told me that it would be the biggest thing that I ever had to face and believe me, when they take your liver out of ya and put another one in it's like replacing a football in your stomach.

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.

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.

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.

I often ask people if they would like to give their organs when they pass on, and they say "Well, I'm not so sure, I don't know." And I said, "Well, would you accept one if you needed one?" "Well, yeah, sure." And I say "Well, there you go - where do you get them from?".

If we had enough cadaver organs to go around we wouldn't do living donor liver transplants because one is we don't want to put a donor at risk, but the second is that it's a more difficult surgery for the recipient because you're getting a piece of a liver rather than a whole liver. It takes you longer to recover, and it has more complications related to where we sew together the blood vessels and the bile ducts.

It is important to note that there are no age limitations on who can donate organs and tissue. Newborns as well as senior citizens have been organ donors.

Kidney donors don't have to be close relatives of recipients, but they do need to have the right blood type. And kidneys from living donors tend to last many years longer than kidneys from deceased donors.

Post-operatively the transplanted kidney functioned immediately with a dramatic improvement in the patient's renal and cardiopulmonary status.

Kidney transplants seem so routine now. But the first one was like Lindbergh's flight across the ocean.

We don't have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose.

Removal of an organ is difficult and dangerous. There have been several deaths of healthy donors. I think myself, I would be hesitant to participate as a liver donor. It's a very tricky operation.

I recently have had a full hip replacement and a liver transplant, and I'm getting used to the medication.

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.

My success in transplanting arteries between animals has pioneered surgical techniques that being closer the day when hearts and other organs will be transplanted into humans. No effort should be spared to reach this goal.

There can be legal conflicts over whether registering intent is enough to qualify you as an organ donor or whether a doctor must still ask your family's permission.

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

Transplant is a life-changing 'experience. Organ donation transforms lives. It is torture for you, torment for you as an individual in need.

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

My dad gave me one of his kidneys.

You can make pigs that are essentially much closer to being universal donors. If it works, their organs will be going into people like you and me.

I blacked out in a Rite Aid. The doctor told me my heart function was at 5 percent. I spent two months in the hospital waiting to have a transplant. For me, that was the end of the world.