MORGANTOWN – WVU Medicine and the Transplant Alliance on Thursday honored organ donors and their family members who made the choice to help others in need.
Family members attended a short ceremony Thursday afternoon and then proceeded to the donor wall just off the Ruby Memorial Hospital lobby where the names of their loved ones are memorialized.
WVUM Transplant Services Vice President Mike Shullo opened the ceremony with some remarks. “Transplant donors are a gift, they are selfless,” he said. The family members are equally selfless. “You’ve changed lives in ways that are unmeasurable.”
Spritual Care Chaplain Kim Belcher offered some reflections. With almost 12 years in service, she said, she’s worked with families who were making the choice to donate organs of loved ones they’d just lost.
She often hears families, she said, say of their loved ones, “They loved helping people; they would do anything to help people. Of course we will do this because this is a way to continue helping folks.”
Donating, she said, is a spiritual act, a way of carrying out the Golden Rule that is so fundamental to so many faith and belief systems.
Kayla Gray is a patient services liaison with the Center for Organ Recovery & Education. “I can’t think of anything more worthy of tribute than choosing to give another human being, often a complete stranger, the chance at a better quality of life or a second chance at life itself, and this wall is a tribute to them and their incredible legacy.”
Dr. Casey McClusky works in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and WVUM Children’s and said she’s been on both sides of phone calls: to parents to tell them their child can’t be saved, and to parents to tell them an organ is available to save their child. “Both of these situations are incredibly sacramental moments for me,” she said.
She said, “You cannot put into words the gift that is being given at these moments. … I’m in awe of families who are able to give the gift from their children.” As the daughter of a kidney transplant recipient, “We are forever grateful for the gift of life and the extra time that we are given.”
Dr. Patrick Tomboc is a pediatric oncologist. He described how 60 years ago, children with cancer had no chance of survival, But now, with advanced treatments, 90% to 95% of children can survive.
But the treatments cause side effects and often take a toll on kidneys livers, lungs, hearts. “That’s why organ transplant, organ donation is so important. I can claw back a lot of time for a lot of my patients, and get a lot of them to survive their cancer. But it’s later in life that some of them will require a heart, a lung, a liver, to gain more time. … It takes the amazing gift that you have given to get back all the time I want to get back to my patients.”
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