« Back

Your gift of life

If you received your transplant from a deceased donor, you may have some questions about your donor, your donor’s family and the process of donation.  We want to give you some background about how you received this precious gift.

The process of donation really begins with a decision – the decision to save lives.  Your donor may have made this decision when they applied for or renewed their driver’s license or state identification card, or perhaps listed it in a living will or in an online registry.  If they were registered as an organ and tissue donor, we honored their decision upon their death.  If he or she had not made a decision about donation, we asked their family to make a decision about donation on their behalf.

LifeSource has strong partnerships with hospitals throughout the Upper Midwest, and our team works with the hospital staff to support the families of donors through the process as they begin their grief journey.  We also coordinate with the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) to find the best matches for the donor’s organs and then call the transplant center for each patient.  This is when your physician or coordinator would have called you to let you know that an organ was available.

Once all of the organs have been matched with waiting recipients, the surgical teams from the recipient’s transplant center come to the donor’s hospital to recover the organs and then return to their center to perform the transplant.  This is a complex process can take upwards of a day or more.

As you know, the identity of both the donor and recipient are kept confidential.  We send a letter to the donor’s family after the donation with some general information about who their loved one’s organs helped.  We also provide grief support and resources in the months and years following their loved one’s death and donation.

If donor families and recipients choose to communicate, it is done so anonymously through the transplant center and LifeSource.  You can read more about writing to your donor’s family here.