Organ Donation: A Donor Family's Perspective

On November, 28, 1999, my world changed forever. I was at work and got a phone call that my almost three month old son, Trey, was being taken to the hospital via ambulance. I left work and rushed to the hospital. When I arrived, I was escorted to the family room where I found my husband without any shoes on sitting in a chair crying. After a few minutes, the doctor came in and told us that Trey's heart stopped beating for over 30 minutes and that they finally got it started again, but his prognosis was grim. We made the decision to airlift him to LeBonheur's Children's Hospital in Memphis.

As we drove to Memphis, we prayed for the best and expected the worst. Once we got there, we learned that our son had been having seizures that the emergency room doctors missed. Trey was set up in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and our short journey began. He was unresponsive and unable to breathe on his own. After having some tests done, it was determined that his time without oxygen had damaged his brain stem, which controls breathing. Without the continuous help of the ventilator, our son would never breathe again.

On November 29, we made the agonizing decision that quality of life was more important than quantity of life. If we wanted to keep our son alive, he would never wake up and would never be the little boy we so fondly remembered. After some prayer and discussion, my husband and I decided to donate Trey's organs so that other families wouldn't have to experience the heartache we were experiencing.

We agreed that his internal organs would all be donated, but refused to donate his eyes or skin. We signed the consent forms and the agonizing two day process of declaring him legally brain dead began. We weren't allowed to hold him during that time because if moving him caused his blood pressure to rise, we couldn't donate his organs if medication was needed to get his blood pressure under control.

Late in the evening of November 30, we finally got to hold our little boy before they took him to the operating room to begin the donation process and do an autopsy. Shortly after we said goodbye to our son, four other families got the call that organs their children needed to live were available.

Every single day that I look at the picture of my baby that was taken only two days before he went to the emergency room, I thank God for the time that He gave us Trey and I thank God that my son got to save four children.

We have often wondered how those children were doing. Because of privacy laws, we had to go through the transplant foundation to contact the families. For 11 years, we heard nothing. Finally, on January 3, 2011, we got a letter from one of the families through the MidSouth Transplant Foundation. The little boy who got Trey's heart suffered from Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, a condition in which the heart doesn't form properly and only half of the heart works. He is alive and living a full, active life now.

Organ donation is a sometimes touchy subject; however, after getting the picture of the boy who is alive because my son passed away, I have no doubt that we made the right decision to donate his organs. Now, Trey's memory lives on with us and the families who accepted the organ donation offer.