UNOS is the United Network for Organ Sharing and they maintain the wait list for transplants across the United States. The date you are placed on the wait list determines when you get a deceased donor organ transplant. The date is supposed to transfer with you when you switch transplant centers. I happened to look at an update letter from UCLA and noticed their date was in July 2017. I went back to my files and found a letter from St. Joseph Hospital that said I was listed with UNOS in September 2016.
I quickly emailed my transplant coordinator at UCLA and she returned my email within the hour. There are many dates involved but she printed out my records and it has my UNOS qualified date in September 2016. She said the other dates are for administrative bookkeeping but the important date is the UNOS date and it matches what I have from St. Joseph. Whew… I thought I lost 10 months in the transfer. So instead of 2.5 years, I have about 3.5 years accrued on the deceased donor wait list. If I ever transfer to the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, that may be enough to get a transplant right away.
On the UNOS website, there are lots of statistics on transplants. It says UCLA completed 408 kidney transplants last year, with 139 live donor transplants. For St. Joseph Hospital, the numbers are 15 and 3. Nationwide, there were 23,401 kidney transplants last year, while there are 94.668 people on the wait list. That means the average wait time is ~4 years but it varies by location and blood type. If you look at % transplanted by blood type, type B is consistently the lowest. For years listed between 2011-2014, after two years, only 11.1% of blood type B candidates received a transplant. Compare that to type O at 12.2%, type A at 17.6%, and type AB at 29.7%. You would expect type O to be the lowest since they can only receive kidney from type O donors, whereas type AB can receive a kidney from anyone. My guess is that most Asians are type B and Asians just don’t sign up to be organ donors, either from tradition, laziness, or ignorance. That 6.5% difference between type A and type B works out to several extra years on the wait list for type B transplant candidates.
Of course, I am Asian and blood type B positive. Longest groups on the wait list!
Life with chronic diseases 