About that 10 year old who recieved a second pair of lungs...

[Cleita]

9. I think that person passed over was probably over fifty.

Sometimes a decision is made that it's better to give a young child a chance because an older person has had a chance to live their life. I'm not necessarily talking about transplants but just the way humanity has acted historically. If there is a famine usually the older members of the family will go without food so the children could eat. Again the reasoning is that the old person has had a chance at life and now the youngest need their chance.

My husband who suffered from end stage renal disease refused to be on the transplant list because he was past seventy. There were so many young people in the dialysis clinic that needed a transplant that he felt he had lived his life so they deserved a chance to finish living theirs. One of the nurses told me in confidence that he probably wouldn't have been given a kidney anyway unless there was an excess of them and even then finding a doctor who would do the transplant on an elderly patient was a rare bird because of the possible malpractice suit if it wasn't successful. The odds of a successful transplant diminished with elderly patients.