-: My name is Laura Cwynar and I am the Organ Recovery
Manager for the Center for Organ Recovery
and Education in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
We basically service as the link
between the donor family and the recipients.
So what will happen is if there's any end
of life conversation at the hospital by a family,
the hospital will call into our organization and
we'll dispatch a coordinator to go onsite at the hospital.
They do a chart review, they huddle
with the nursing staff to find
out what the family's thinking,
is there gonna be a change,
of plan in care, and how we could best support them?
If a family were to make the decision to
take their loved one towards comfort measures
and take them off of a ventilator.
If a family decides to donate
the next role would be donor management.
That's when we start getting the organs
of the individual that's donating
to work and function as best
as they can prior to locating recipients.
And then the last role would be going
to the OR with the donor
and working with the transplant surgeons to perfuse
and package the organs
and make sure they're going where they need to
be for the recipients.
I was an organ procurement coordinator for about 12 years.
During that time, I also did service
as a hospital development liaison where
I worked specifically with a group of hospitals in Erie
Pennsylvania through the donation process
and any education needs they had regarding donation.
And most recently, the last two and a half years
I've been the supervisor
over the coordinators that get to travel
with the transplant surgeons, work with them directly
in the OR and profuse the organs and package them.
There is a processor that we work
with in combination to recover bone marrow.
So we have trained some
of my coordinators to recover portions
of the spine and once they do that, that is sent
to the processor where they extract the bone marrow.
And what they're doing
on their end is what's really exciting.
They're using it to treat autoimmune diseases.
Some of the transplant recipients
after they receive their gift of donation
they're also using it to treat some HIV patients
and it's basically looking at stem cells.
So I feel like that's really rewarding
for my team to know they're having such an impact
on something in the medical field that's growing right now.
For the hours in general in our field
they tend to be on call,
whether they're a combination of 12 hour or 24 hour shifts.
So you have to be able to be flexible
and have a good support system
at home because there are times, you know
you might be away from your family working on a holiday
but I think it's to know
that someone else one day is gonna be able to be
out of the hospital and at home with theirs.