New book tells 42 stories of life that sprang from death

By Stephanie Salter
THE TRIBUNE STAR (TERRE HAUTE, Ind.)

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. Fri, May 16 2008

— With all the other national awareness campaigns going on in April — from autism to alcohol — it would be easy to miss one of the most significant, wide reaching and long lasting:

This is National Donate Life Month.

While there are, literally, millions of Americans who can speak first-hand about organ or tissue donation, I doubt anyone in this country knows more about the myriad experiences of transplant recipients and donor families than does Reg Green.

He knows because he and his wife are the parents of a donor and because he has spent nearly the past 14 years collecting stories of recipients and donors from all over the world.

I have written about Reg and Maggie Green many times since their story made headlines in September 1994. While vacationing in Italy with their two young children, the California couple’s rented car was mistaken for a jewelry courier’s and fired upon by gun-wielding highway bandits.

Sleeping in the back seat were Eleanor, 4, and Nicholas, 7. Eleanor was unscathed, but a bullet pierced the back of Nicholas’ skull and severely damaged his brain. He never regained consciousness.

To the astonishment of Italians, most Europeans and many people in the United States, the Greens chose to donate Nicholas’ organs to gravely ill Italian patients. All seven of them are still alive.

In his grief, Reg Green, a former newspaper reporter, turned for some comfort to his journalist’s tendencies for inquiry and organization. Wherever he and Maggie went to receive another award or honor in Nicholas’ name, Reg took notes, gathered contacts and expanded his storehouse of organ transplant data and anecdotes.

He wrote a book, “The Nicholas Effect,” and created with Maggie a foundation for gifted children. Together they advised the creative team for a television film about their story and helped produce several educational videos for health-care professionals and potential donors.

Now 79, Reg logs about 50,000 miles a year telling the Greens’ story and raising awareness about organ and tissue donation. Not long ago, his travels brought him to Indiana to consult with the Bloomington publisher of his new book, “The Gift That Heals” (AuthorHouse).

The book, which was suggested by the United Network for Organ Sharing, is a compelling collection of 42 accounts. Most are by people whose existence was either saved or radically enhanced when someone — usually a stranger — transcended grief and gave the gift of life.

The stories range from a 22-year-old Olympic snow-boarder who was struck down by a rare virus to a disabled veteran of World War II, who had spent 48 years in blindness. A donated cornea permitted the latter to see for the first time ever the faces of his five children and seven grandchildren.

The man, Harold Urick, of Cleveland, told Reg about the morning after his surgery when his doctor began to remove the bandages:

“I was lying face down on the bed and the first thing I saw were his shoes — the first thing I’d seen in 48 years — then his pants. I looked up and saw he was wearing glasses. It was still a bit fuzzy, but they’d warned me it would take a while.

“Then I looked down the bed and there was Jean [Urick’s wife], looking as pretty as she did when I first met her. Then I looked at Yvonne, my oldest daughter. It was the first time I’d ever seen her face. And she was beautiful, too.”

Many of the stories in “The Gift That Heals” came to Reg’s attention when he issued a national request to hundreds of doctors, nurses and organ donation officials he has met in his travels and correspondence. He’d asked them to share the most memorable stories of donors and recipients they’d encountered.

There was no shortage of examples.

Nearly half-a-million people in this nation have had an organ transplant, and millions have received tissue, such as corneas, heart valves and skin. Transplant surgeries are done in scores of hospitals here and hundreds around the globe.

“Yet, although transplantation is an everyday procedure … public opinion still treats it as though it were on the fringe of medicine,” Reg writes in the new book’s preface. “Few people think about it at all until they become personally involved. It then takes over their lives.”

As he has learned since 1994, organ transplantation “is the most egalitarian of cures, leaping over all the normal social barriers. White men are walking around with black men’s hearts inside them and vice versa. Asians are breathing through Hispanic lungs and vice versa. And — dare I say it? — Democrats see the world through Republican corneas and vice versa.”

When asked in the abstract, most Americans respond favorably to the idea of organ donation. Not nearly so many take it the next step and make their wishes known to family members and sign donor registrations.

If and when grim reality forces a choice (usually in a hospital), the paradigm is reversed; most people are unprepared and ill-equipped to comprehend the gift they hold.

“In the absence of any previous discussion, a family in the waiting room of a trauma hospital is often bewildered … Misconceptions are commonplace,” Reg writes. “Some people are convinced that if they sign a donor card the doctors will not try as hard to save them. Some think their church is against transplantation. Others say of someone who has just died, ‘I don’t want her to be hurt anymore.’

“Everything is working against calm thought … Making a major, irrevocable decision there and then about something they have never seriously thought about is too much for many people. They say ‘no’ and often regret it for the rest of their lives.”

The Greens would know about that. Despite the passage of time, they still serve as a focal point for strangers to share their stories of donating and receiving organs. The messages come via e-mail, phone call, letter or post-speech visit.

“It is those who didn’t donate who often have regrets,” Reg writes in the book. “At meetings about organ donation people will come up, with tears in their eyes, to say, ‘I wish I’d done that.’”

As two people who have been in the hospital waiting room, who have had to accept the unacceptable and live forever with an irreplaceable loss, the Greens know the territory better than most. But as people who also repeatedly have seen unquantifiable good come out of death, they have dedicated their lives to help others temper the pain through giving.

As Reg says in “The Gift That Heals”:

“A donation produces on average three or four organs, saving three or four families from devastation, in addition to tissue that can help up to 50 people. Most people in their whole lives will never again have as great an opportunity to change the world for the better as they have at that moment.”

Stephanie Salter writes for The Tribune Star in Terre Haute, Ind. She can be reached at stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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