Page 39 - BusinessWest December 26, 2022
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  Mark Auerbach says he’s ‘going public’ with his quest for a new kidney to help raise awareness about the importance of organ donations and perhaps shorten the time on the waiting list for some of those in need.
  Wait of the World
For Those on the Organ-donation List, It’s a Painful Numbers Game
MBy George O’Brien
ark Auerbach says he had started
down the stairs in his home in Longmeadow that night in 2019 when he tripped over an untied shoelace and started falling. He
recalls knocking a bannister out of the railing and slamming through his front door.
As a result of the fall, he broke his femur and his hand, eventually spending more than three months in inpatient rehabilitation. But the fall did something else. It “fatally injured” one of his kid- neys, as he put it, accelerating a process of dete- rioration that had begun years earlier when he was diagnosed with diabetes.
“In 2019, my kidney doctor said, ‘you are head- ing for the need for a transplant, and you’re in stage 4; eventually, you’ll be in stage 5, and you’ll need one,” he recalled, adding that stage 5 essen- tially arrived in the spring of 2021.
Soon thereafter, Auerbach, a veteran arts report- er, owner of a public-relations firm that bears his name, and current ArtsBeat reporter for Pioneer Valley Radio, joined the lengthy list of people in this country on a waiting list for a donated kidney.
How lengthy? Well, he was accepted into a donor program at Massachusetts General Hospital and is now one of roughly 1,400 patients in a queue
waiting for the proverbial ‘right donor.’ Nationwide, there are approximately 100,000 people on such lists.
While waiting for a kidney, many on those lists choose to be proactive and not simply wait. Some buy billboards stating their case, while others take out ads in newspapers and use social-media chan- nels to encourage people to come forward and donate — not just for them, but for the myriad oth- ers waiting for a truly life-changing gift.
Auerbach is one of them. He said he has “gone public” — but in a quiet way, with personal appeals; regular postings on Facebook, Linke-
dIn, and Twitter; and interviews like this one and another on his ArtsBeat show with guest (and long- time friend) Patrick Berry, host of WWLP’s Mass Appeal — in his quest to find a donor for himself, but also to raise awareness about the urgent need for organs and to spur action.
“I didn’t really want to go public — you sacrifice your personal privacy when you put it out there,” he told BusinesWest. “So I was really hesitant. But from a public-relations standpoint, I realized that if I didn’t tell my story, I couldn’t expect someone else to do it.”
He started with letters to family members, close friends, and clients alerting them to his situation and framing it in the larger context mentioned ear- lier — that he is one of 100,000 people waiting for a kidney and ‘here are the things you can do to help
“
to go public — you
sacrifice your personal
privacy when you put
it out there. So I was
really hesitant. But
from a public-relations
standpoint, I realized
that if I didn’t tell my
story, I couldn’t expect
”
Business of Aging
I didn’t really want
          someone else to do it.
 BusinessWest
BUSINESS OF AGING
DECEMBER 26, 2022 39
 
































































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