When I found out I’d be guest-blogging for Family Jewels in April, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to bring my annual spring rant about organ donations to a new and larger audience. I went looking for the dates of the official National Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness Week in Canada, but it turns out that doesn’t start until April 19. I figured, though, that it would be okay if I started campaigning a little bit early.

Did you know that every three days in Canada someone dies waiting for an organ transplant? And did you know that Canada has one of the lowest organ donation rates of the industrialized world?

I write a post about organ donation every year because my dad had a liver transplant in 2001, when I was six months pregnant with my first son. He has hepatitis C, which he got from an infected blood transfusion in the early 1980s. If you’re interested, you can read my post about his illness and his transplant back in my archives.

So I was all ready to regale you with statistics and our story when I heard this story on the news this morning. Honestly, I can’t even bring myself to read the whole article and I nearly had to pull off the road for the tears when I heard the story while I was driving to work. It’s about two families with horribly sick babies, one making the ultimate sacrifice so the other has a chance at life. It’s truly one of the most heart-wrenching stories I’ve ever heard.

Every three days a family in Canada loses a father, a mother, a brother, a sister—or a child—because there simply aren’t enough organs for all the people on waiting lists. A single donor can make a difference in as many as fifty people’s lives. And that’s just the recipients; think of the families of all those people given a second chance at life, or the chance to overcome blindness, or the chance at restored mobility through a bone graft.

In Canada, we don’t have a centralized organ donation registry because the provinces and territories are responsible for this aspect of health care. However, the Organ Donation and Transplant Association has compiled information for donors in each province and territory on its website. American friends can visit OrganDonor.gov. You can’t take them with you, you know, and after you’re gone your organs can still do a world of good.

Sign your donor card and talk your family about organ and tissue donation. Choose the gift of life.