9 Gift-of-life? The Psychosocial Experiences ... 223Gift rhetoric has the capacity to condition, and even prescribe, the
experience of transplantation and recipients’ moral understanding
of what has transpired in the event of their transplant (Shaw 2012 ,
2015a). Many heart recipients demonstrated the ‘good recipient’
response to their transplant, which entailed a post-transplant ‘construc-
tion of care’ (Sothern and Dickinson 2011 ) including gratitude for the
gift-of-life, responsible healthcare management (e.g. strict adherence
to immunosuppressant regimes, healthy diet, and regular exercise) and
attempts to help others. When I mentioned to Diana (quoted above)
that some people had spoken about feeling a sense of responsibility in
relation to their heart, she responded:
Oh, you mean I feel the responsibility that I have to look after it? Oh yes.
Yes, yeah. I feel that, ah, oh yes, I do look after it. I try to lose weight.
Um, I look after it. Take my medication ... I do exercise ... I try to con-
tribute back. Like today [participating in the study], I wanted to help
those coming after me.Colin spoke of his attempt to set up a support group to help oth-
ers: ‘I mean it’s a privilege to have it done. Why not tell other people
about it?’, and also his frustration that staff at the hospital did not help
to promote this group: ‘We put a brochure up, but people didn’t avail
themselves of it because it wasn’t pushed by the girls there ... That, that
would be the only failing I would put on the hospital’. John attempted
to help others by becoming a pro-donation advocate:
I can try to get people to appreciate what it is. But they do that just by
seeing me and by seeing other transplant patients as well ... I think they
[DonateLife] should show a little more of the people who have received
this gift, um, and centre on just getting people on donation. Getting
them on the register. That’s the most important thing.Heart recipients endorsed the understanding that transplantation is,
indeed, the gift-of-life and acknowledged awareness of being judged
in their attempts to establish deservingness of the gift-of-life. Having
established their worthiness, it could be that the social aspects of the
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