Transplants offer solace in time of heartache

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Transplants offer solace in time of heartache
Updated 1/26/2011 11:20 AM | 
   
By Rita Rubin, USA TODAY

Laura Ehrbar DePiero has heard that some people think transplant recipients start acting like their donors.
Ehrbar DePiero doesn't know of any evidence to back that up, but she likes to think there's an older man out there with a healthy new heart who has taken up basketball and hates when the foods on his plate touch each other.

Just like her son Andrew.

Andrew, 13, and his sister, Erin Ehrbar, a couple days shy of her 17th birthday, died after their car was broadsided April 28 by a car driven by another student at Erin's high school.

Erin had just pulled out of the driveway of their Medina, Ohio, home and was heading to school when the crash occurred. She was pronounced dead at the scene; her brother was taken to the hospital but died the next day.

Without hesitation, Ehrbar DePiero and the teens' stepfather, Chris DePiero (their father had died several years earlier) decided to donate their organs and tissues.

"That's what they would have wanted," says their mother, a registered nurse who manages program development for the Cleveland Clinic Hospice. "It was kind of an easy decision for us."

Donating their child's organs not only gives parents "some sense of closure, it also allows them to know that their child is living on in a special way," says George Mazariegos, a pediatric liver and intestine transplant surgeon at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh. "That's very healing and very powerful for them."

More recently, John Green, the father of 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green who was killed in the Jan. 8 shooting outside a Tucson supermarket, told the Associated Press that two children had received his daughter's corneas.

"When a child dies, there is a great sense of urgency to try to find some meaning for this death, because it has occurred prematurely," says James Rodrigue, a psychologist with the Transplant Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

"If parents can help other parents not have to go through the same experience of their children dying," Rodrigue says, "they're more inclined to donate organs."

Bonding can be a factor

In fact, family members are more likely to donate organs when the deceased is a child, Rodrigue and other researchers have consistently found. Parents of about two-thirds of children who are eligible to be donors consent, Rodrigue says. When the deceased is an adult, family members consent to donation about half the time, he says.

"Parents are accustomed to making decisions for their children," explains Karen Baer, chief medical officer for Lifebanc, a procurement organization that provides organs to the transplant programs at the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospital Case Medical Center, also in Cleveland.

In Rodrigue's research, parents were more likely to consent to donation if they were satisfied with the health care team that took care of their child. Because donor candidates often die suddenly as a result of injuries or a brain hemorrhage, parents might not have spent much time with the caregivers. But, says Jane Lee, a critical care specialist at the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, "it's a situation where bonds and relationships can be established very quickly."

When doctors raise the subject of donation to parents of eligible children, "we're just making sure they're aware that they have this option, that it's a choice, an opportunity. "

Andrew is 'a hero'

Parents whose children were old enough to drive often know what choice their son or daughter would have wanted them to make.

Erin Ehrbar had indicated on her driver's license that she wanted to be an organ donor. Because she died in the accident, her solid organs were deprived of oxygen-carrying blood too long to allow donation. He mother and stepfather agreed to donate her corneas and other tissue.

They also donated Andrew's heart, kidneys, pancreas and liver as well as his corneas and other tissue. They were "almost a little disappointed" when they learned a bruise on one of Andrew's lungs prevented donation of those organs.

"We think he's a hero," Ehrbar DePiero says of her son. "He was healthy. He was vibrant. I think whoever got his organs are some of the luckiest people in the world."

The recipients think so, too. Around Thanksgiving, Andrew's family received a card from one of them and letters from the other two. The correspondence was sent via Lifebanc, the organ procurement organization.

Andrew's family doesn't know the recipients' names or where they live, just as the recipients don't know who their donor was.

Because Andrew was closer in size to an adult than a child, his organs went to people in their 50s and 60s. The woman who received Andrew's pancreas and kidney had suffered from complications of diabetes. Ehrbar DePiero frequently rereads her letter, getting satisfaction from knowing that Andrew's gift has given the woman the chance to live a full life.

She hasn't written anyone back yet, "because I just don't know what I want to say. I don't want to be pouring out every detail about Andrew."

Maybe eventually, she says, she'll tell Lifebanc that she'd like to meet them, if they're willing. She would like to see how they're doing and thank them for taking good care of Andrew's organs, like he had. "The pain is still there, but knowing their death wasn't for naught, that they're still here helping other people, it gives you such peace."

 http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/parenting-family/2011-01-24-transplants24_ST_N.htm