Organ donation is usually discussed in terms of statistics. Waiting list numbers. Percentages. Lives saved per donor. But behind every one of those figures is a person making an impossible decision, or a person whose life was handed back to them by a stranger’s choice.
Over the past two and a half years and more than 100 episodes of Don’t Be Caught Dead, I’ve sat with six people who each know organ donation from a completely different seat at the table: the nurse who guides families through the decision, the woman who received a liver and got her life back, the mother who gave her own kidney, the donation specialist who carries her friend’s story with her every day, the mother who said yes for her son, and the photographer who has been on both sides of it, as a two-time recipient and as the documentarian whose images have moved other families to say yes. Put their voices side by side, and you get something the statistics never show you: how differently this one act can be experienced, and how consistently it changes everything.
The Nurse Who Sits With the Dying
Jessica Amsden has one of the newest and most delicate jobs in Australian healthcare. As DonateLife Victoria’s Family Communication Nursing Coordinator, she works with people who are choosing to donate their organs after Voluntary Assisted Dying, a pathway whose first case in Australia only happened in 2023.
What struck me most in our conversation was how she described the shift in power this creates. In a traditional donation conversation, a family is blindsided, grieving, exhausted, trying to guess what their person would have wanted. “We would say, what do you think [she] would say if she was here?” Jess told me. But with VAD, there’s no guessing. “We can ask the person, what is it that you’d like to know? We want people to ask us.”
That difference matters more than it might seem. Jess shared research that when families know clearly what their loved one wanted, eight in ten will support donation. When they’re unsure, that drops to four in ten. Certainty, it turns out, is a gift donors can give their own families.
She also told me about Marlene, a former nurse with motor neurone disease who became Victoria’s first organ donor following VAD. Marlene knew before she died that her decision would help four people. “I think she had a big smile on her face when she was told that news,” Jess said. Marlene’s legacy is still shaping how this pathway is built, years on.
For Jess, the myths are the hardest thing to shift. People believe smoking or drinking rules them out. It rarely does. People believe donation might influence someone’s decision to access VAD. It doesn’t, and there are strict safeguards, including that no donation conversation happens until a person’s VAD permit is already granted, to keep the two decisions completely separate.
The Woman Who Was Saved by One
Jessica Chappell’s story starts with a baptism. Meadow arrived six weeks premature, and it was at her baptism twelve weeks later that Jessica’s aunt, a nurse, looked closely at her in a receiving line and said, “You look a bit yellow.” Within 24 hours, Jessica was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis, a condition triggered in her case by the hormonal surge of childbirth. She was told it would either take her life or require a transplant.
What followed was years of managing a chronic illness while raising her daughter, until a collapse in her bathroom in 2018 changed the trajectory entirely. She doesn’t remember much of the conversation her husband had with doctors that day. He remembers it clearly: it was time to waitlist her for a transplant.
Jessica received a liver from someone she has never met. “Someone’s life ended so my life could continue,” she told me. “And whilst my family were sitting in a hospital room hoping for the best, someone else and their immediate family were sitting in a hospital room grieving an unimaginable and unexpected loss.” She holds both truths at once, gratitude and grief for a family she’s never met, and it’s that dual awareness that now drives her advocacy. Her message to anyone who will listen: organ donation transforms lives, and every conversation about it counts.
The Mother Who Became a Donor
Moira Kelly’s name is best known for bringing conjoined twins Krishna and Trishna from Bangladesh to Melbourne for separation surgery in 2009. What’s less known is what happened in 2021, when Krishna, by then her adopted daughter and a teenager, went into end-stage kidney failure during the pandemic.
Moira didn’t hesitate. “Can I do that? Can I do that?” she remembers asking, before she’d even learned that living donation was possible. She’d only ever heard of donors who had died. When she discovered she could give her own kidney, and passed the rigorous medical assessment required, she described it simply: “It was such an easy thing to do, and it’s such a good thing to do.”
She’s since learned that roughly 14,000 Australians are waiting for a kidney, and it’s changed how she talks about donation to everyone around her. “I’ve got the same kidney function I had before I gave my kidney away. You wouldn’t even know I had one kidney.” The hardest part, she said, wasn’t the surgery. It was that for the first time in her life, she couldn’t be in the hospital with Krishy while she recovered, because Moira was recovering at a different hospital herself.
The Advocate Who Carries a Friend’s Story
Samantha Stones works as a Donation Specialist Nurse Coordinator, meeting families in hospital in the hours after they learn their loved one won’t survive. It’s a role that requires holding space for people on the worst day of their lives while gently raising one of the most significant decisions they’ll ever make. Less than 2 percent of people who die in Australia do so in circumstances where organ donation is even possible, so every conversation carries weight.
But before Sam wore that badge, she carried a personal story that still shapes how she does the job. A friend of hers, 33, was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer not long after she started at DonateLife. “Oh, they’re not going to want my organs now,” he asked her early on. As his cancer progressed, he asked again, and this time Sam had an answer: he could still donate his corneas. He called DonateLife himself and self-consented.
“Every time I visited him after he consented, he would be telling me, oh, I’m going to help restore the sight of two people,” Sam said. For a man facing a terminal diagnosis, that certainty gave him something to hold onto. For Sam, it’s a story she carries into every family conversation she has today.
The Mother Who Said Yes for Her Son
Adele lost her son Dan in 2020, just days before his 48th birthday, after a fall that left him with unsurvivable brain damage. He was conscious just long enough afterward for the people who came to his aid to help him call his mother from his own phone. By the time he reached hospital he had lost consciousness for good, and the neurosurgeon reviewing his scans told Adele it was unsurvivable. She could hardly believe it. She’d spoken to him only a couple of hours before.
Dan had never told his family he wanted to be an organ donor. But when hospital staff at the Royal Melbourne asked about his wishes, Adele, his father, his three siblings, their partners, and Dan’s ex-wife were unanimous. The hospital had been clear that it only takes one holdout to stop a donation going ahead. “We either all needed to be in, or it didn’t happen,” Adele told me. They knew Dan, a drummer with the ska band Area-7 who was, in his mother’s words, kindhearted and endlessly thoughtful of others, would have said yes. “If he wasn’t going to survive, then maybe the best thing that we could do is to give life to someone else,” she said.
Dan’s heart went to one recipient. His two kidneys let two people come off dialysis. His eyes restored someone’s sight, and the family also agreed that skin and bone tissue could be used if needed. About a year later, Adele wrote to Dan’s heart recipient through DonateLife’s anonymous letter system, and has since read back her account of a new lease on life, including meeting her first grandchild.
Adele’s perspective is doubled in a way few people’s are. About a year before we spoke, her brother-in-law Brad, in his early sixties, had been weeks from dying of heart failure when a transplant saved his life. Watching him recover, she found herself holding two people in her mind at once. “If Brad survives, then Dan’s recipient will survive,” she remembers thinking, unable to fully explain the logic of it even to herself. He’s since gone back to work, and back to the football.
The Photographer Who Needed Two Transplants, Then Documented Dozens More
Andrew Chapman has spent more than five decades as one of Australia’s most respected documentary photographers, covering everything from prime ministers to shearing sheds. He has also needed two organ transplants of his own, a liver and, years later, a kidney, and separately spent years turning his camera on other people’s transplant journeys for DonateLife.
A genetic condition called hemochromatosis, which causes the body to store too much iron, quietly destroyed his liver. Hemochromatosis runs in his family: four of his siblings, including Andrew, inherited it. His oldest brother, Chris, died from complications of the disease; a younger brother also passed away, with other health factors contributing. By the time doctors caught his, he’d turned bronze, was itching constantly, and was told his liver was “packing it in.” He was placed in an induced coma after a variceal bleed, with two days left before a liver became available from a donor he would only ever know as “a male round about my age.” He spent over 30 days in intensive care recovering.
That was his first transplant. A decade later, his kidneys, damaged by the medication that had kept him alive during that first crisis, began failing too. This time, the donor wasn’t a stranger. His daughter Sarah gave him one of her kidneys, his second transplant. “You don’t take organs from your kids,” he told me, describing the discomfort he still feels about it even five years on, even as he plans to take her to dinner to mark the anniversary this week. He now celebrates three birthdays annually: his own, his liver’s, and his kidney’s.
Separately from his own two transplants, Andrew has spent years as the volunteer documentary photographer for DonateLife’s Giving Life exhibition, photographing other people’s transplant journeys from the inside. His wife had encouraged him to volunteer for something that wasn’t photography; he rang DonateLife anyway. The project has taken him into operating theatres for corneal transplants, into ICU for the withdrawal of life support, and through a 14-hour liver transplant. He photographed hospital staff holding the dying patient’s hand and stroking their head, without ever showing that person’s face. Years later, a woman wrote to tell him that she and her son had walked past his exhibition every day while her husband lay in ICU after a medevac from Darwin. Seeing those photos was part of what led them to say yes to donation. Five people received life-saving transplants as a result. “I know as a fact that my photography was responsible for a decision that has allowed five people to have a life today that maybe wouldn’t have,” he told me. “That’s why you do it.”
Six Seats at the Same Table
A nurse who helps people design the end of their own story. A recipient who lives with both gratitude and grief. A mother who gave an organ so her daughter wouldn’t have to wait. An advocate whose first understanding of donation came from a dying friend’s question. A mother who said yes for her son, and now carries two families in her heart. A photographer who has needed a stranger’s liver, his own daughter’s kidney, and whose camera has helped other families say yes.
None of them arrived at organ donation the same way. But every one of them describes it as something that gave someone else a sense of purpose, comfort, or a future, at exactly the moment it felt like there was nothing left to give.
That’s the thing the statistics can’t capture. Organ donation isn’t one story. It’s thousands of them, happening in hospital rooms and living rooms across the country, every single day.
If this raised questions for you about your own wishes, or your family’s, that’s exactly the conversation Don’t Be Caught Dead exists to start. You can register your donation decision, and just as importantly, tell your family about it, at donatelife.gov.au.
