Just ask Stacey Oglesby of Lockwood, Missouri, whose 15-year-old daughter, Colbey, died in a car accident in 2001. Colbey had told her mother that when she got her driver’s licence, she was going to sign up to be an organ donor. So when hospital personnel asked about organ donation, Stacey said, “we had no hesitancy.”
Seven people got Colbey’s organs. Her lungs went to Valerie Vandervort, a 29-year-old Oklahoma woman with cystic fibrosis. In the nine years since, Vandervort has run three 5K races (5 kilometres), hiked a mountain, danced at her sister’s wedding, doted on her nieces and nephews, and won medals in swimming at the 2010 National Kidney Foundation United States Transplant Games.
Stacey also befriended the recipient of Colbey’s heart, Judy Kaufman of Chesterfield, who was near death with congestive heart failure. When they met, Stacey took a stethoscope to listen to the beat of her daughter’s heart.
Stacey, who speaks often about Colbey’s legacy, said she has inspired others to become potential organ donors. If not for donating her daughter’s organs and connecting to the recipients, she said, “it would have been hard to get through the grief.”
In addition to kidneys, heart, lungs, liver, pancreas and intestines, donations can include tissues like corneas, skin, heart valves, bone, veins, cartilage, middle ear, tendons and ligaments that can be stored in tissue banks and used when needed.
Most donations come from people who die suddenly, usually from an accident, a gunshot or a brief illness that resulted in brain death. Some Americans indicate their wish to be donors by signing the back of their driver’s licence or a donor card or simply telling their next of kin. For minors in the US, hospital personnel often ask the distraught parents if they would consider donating their child’s organs.
But when 6-year-old Katie Coolican died in 1983 from an undiagnosed heart malformation, it was her mother, Maggie, a nurse, who asked about donating the child’s organs — “to make some sense of it all,” Maggie, of Connecticut, said.
Likewise for Julie Schlueter of Minnesota, whose daughter, Missy, 10, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1992: donating the girl’s organs meant her loss was not in vain. Missy’s liver and one kidney went to a man who four years later won a silver medal in the Summer Olympics in Atlanta; he sent the medal to the Schlueters to thank them for enabling him to live.
Two toddlers, one from Italy and the other from Colorado, got Missy’s heart valves. And an Iowa woman, then 47, got her other kidney and is still doing well 18 years later. When Katie Coolican died, there was no follow-up care for families who donate the organs of their loved ones. After a few years of struggling with grief, her mother wrote about her experience in ‘The American Journal of Nursing’ and began speaking about organ donation around the US. She went back to school, got a master’s degree and wrote a booklet, ‘For Those Who Give and Grieve’.
“Katie’s had a wonderful legacy that continues to this day,” Maggie said. In 1992 she founded the National Donor Family Council for the kidney foundation to help grieving families that donate loved ones’ organs and tissues. The two-year follow-up programme she created for families has become a model for organ donation programmes throughout the United States.
Do not rule yourself out as a potential donor because you think you may be too ill or too old. Only a few circumstances, like pervasive infection or active cancer, absolutely preclude organ donation, and there is no age limit. People in their 80s and 90s have been successful donors of certain tissues, as have newborns.
Even if a person dies after an illness that precludes organ donation, or if too much time elapsed after death for organs to be viable, there is the opportunity of whole-body donation to a medical college, where it can be used in research or to help students learn anatomy.
While it is best to register one’s interest in whole-body donation with a medical school in advance of death, after death it is up to the next of kin to make it happen. You no longer own your body after you die. If this is something you would want for yourself, discuss it with your spouse and children, who must agree with your wishes.
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