Organ Donation Hitting Home

I create a Lenten Project for my Catholic School, St. Mary’s every year. This year transplant awareness hit home for me. My best friend’s niece Kennedy Heiman, was born with Hypoplasmic Left Heart Syndrome. After a year of ups and downs at the Children’s Hospital in Omaha, NE, she ended up in St. Louis in an induced comatose state waiting for a heart. She received her heart last July and life has been so wonderful for her family who had experienced so much trauma in that year (both of Kennedy’s young grandfather’s passed away from cancer with in months of each other). I believe the mother Tonya has been talking to you through Caring Bridge? I also have a close friend Jeanette Wulf, who received a liver transplant. She has had many other complications which made it almost impossible to fulfill her dream of being a mommy. She was blessed in August after and very rocky first trimester for her and the baby with a beautiful baby boy, Jackson. I have a lovely little girl in my class this year. I have watched her older sister struggle to breathe and barely walk from class to class around our school. She was blessed with a lung transplant in late August. She now is the most energetic, happy sixth grader you’ve ever seen. Then one night I was watching the ABC Nightly News and I saw your story. It seemed like a calling, how all of this just seemed to happen at once. Your story and mission were so beautiful that I wanted to be part of it. I was telling one of my friends about your story and she started crying telling me about how her best friend’s 8 year old daughter needed a heart transplant. It was just surreal. I’m an organ donor on my license but never really gave it much thought and here all this people I love are dealing with this at one time. I wanted to find a local organization that would directly use the money to help people. I have given money to certain organizations and then hear how much of the money goes to administrative cost, etc. and I didn’t want that. I wanted to directly affect the person involved and help ease some of the burden they would experience with their transplant. I found Tiger Teams at the Cape Canaveral Hospital. They are a group of health care professionals who educate the community on the importance of becoming an organ donor. They also give grants to local people to help with pre/post transplant expenses. So all of our classes held raffles, bake sales, popcorn, cocoa sales to raise money. We also collect soda pop tabs for the Ronald McDonald House. I created the mystery box. (I’ll send you one). The idea was that a faceless angel has given someone the greatest gift, the gift of life. The box contained and angel on a packet of seeds with a poem about “The Angel’s Gift.” I made each box and sold 144 of them to the students at the school. Translife, the organ procurement agency from Orlando also came and spoke to the children. The speaker was wonderful and had many personal stories to tell to the children and we really inspired to work harder to raise more money. With all of these efforts we raised $1,500 for Tiger Teams. I know this isn’t very short but I’m a blabber!!