February 6, 2006VOL. 44, NO. 3Oakland, CA

Organ donation — giving life to another

By Barbara Erickson
Associate editor

The day Tony Diaz fell from a balcony and lay dying in a Chico hospital, his family gathered to hear a delicate plea for help: Would they donate his organs to patients waiting for transplants?

Diaz, 29 years old and one of 10 children, had struck his head on a railroad tie and would soon die without artificial life support. Eight of his siblings and his parents listened as staff from the California Transplant Donor Network spoke of patients waiting for the gift of life, of the need for healthy hearts, kidneys and other organs.

They heard of the 89,000 people in the U.S. on waiting lists for life-saving organ transplants, of the 20 people who, on average, die each day waiting for organs. They learned that the hospital had been required by law to notify an organ procurement group when brain death is imminent.

They may also have known that Catholic teaching supports organ donation – Pope John Paul II called it “a genuine act of love” – and Sacramento Bishop William Weigand is himself the recipient of a partial liver transplant from a live donor.

Family consent
When the Network staff approached the family, they were “very cautious, very understanding, very humble,” said Gina McKeen, the eldest of the siblings. Although the family had never considered organ donation before, they knew their brother would want to do it.

“We said we had to really think about what Tony would have wanted, not what we wanted,” said McKeen, a member of Christ the King Parish in Pleasant Hill. “It didn’t take us long because we all knew Tony so well.”

The family gave their consent, and doctors harvested his heart, liver, pancreas, a cornea, his kidneys, skin from his back, and bone from his arms and legs. That was in September 2002, and in the three years since her brother died, McKeen has been sending letters through the Network in an effort to meet the recipients.

She has made contact with one of them, a man also named Tony and, like his donor, one of 10 children in a family of three boys. She hopes especially to communicate with the person who received her brother’s heart.

Waiting for a donor
Crystal Capser is herself a recipient who applauds the family’s decision to give life. Capser, a parishioner at St. Joseph in Pinole, went into end stage kidney failure after living with Type I diabetes for more than 27 years. A transplant was her best chance for long-term survival, and doctors told her that a dual operation – transplanting a kidney and pancreas at the same time – would free her from diabetes.

She had always taken care of herself, Capser said, and she was declared fit to undergo the double procedure. She placed herself on a waiting list and began a regimen of home dialysis.

“Dialysis is a slow death and you don’t feel well,” Capser said, but she kept track of her progress upward on the list. “Sometimes I was two or three on the list, and then I would be bumped back down again.”

Recipients move up or down in priority depending on the severity of their illness and any complications that might arise, such as coming down with the flu. And those at the top of the list might be skipped if someone below is a better match for the organs being donated.
A generous act

Donors should be approximately the same size as the recipient, have the same blood type and, usually, have the same ethnic background. On Nov. 8, 2000, after she had spent more than a year on the waiting list, Capser got the call that said her match had been found.

Her operation was a success. “For the past five years I’ve been doing wonderfully,” she said. “The organs are functioning beautifully. I feel blessed each and every day.”

She has also gained the friendship of her donor’s family, the relatives of Juan Namowicz, who was 24 when he died. He was working as a tree feller when a crew, not knowing he was on the ground, dropped a tree on him.
Namowicz left a wife and two children.

Capser wrote a four-page letter to his family through the Network, “just thanking them and letting them know who I was.” When they responded, she said, it “was as exciting as getting the phone call about the transplant. I wrote back and they called the next day.”

Now Capser and her donor’s family get together often. “We talk on the phone,” she said. “His sister and I email each other all the time. They tell me they’re very grateful his organs went to me.”

Church teaching
During a speech to the International Congress of the Transplantation Society in 2000, Pope John Paul II said the decisions of donor family members have “their own ethical validity,” and declared that organ donation was not just “giving away something that belongs to us but giving something of ourselves.”

He cautioned that donation must be free of commercial interest, that organs should not be sold, and that decisions on who receives transplants must not be based on a person’s usefulness or on their ethnicity, religion or other personal factors, but solely on their clinical situation.

“There is a need to instill in people’s hearts, especially in the hearts of the young, a genuine and deep appreciation of the need for brotherly love, a love that can find expression in the decision to become an organ donor,” the pope said.

Deep gratitude
McKeen said she experiences the grateful love of organ recipients when she attends events in honor of donor families. “Whenever I get around recipients, they are just so grateful,” she said. “It gives you the justification that what you did was correct.”

She sends a letter at least once a year to all of her brother’s recipients through the Network. She simply says that her family would like to hear from them if they feel like responding, but so far only the other Tony, the liver recipient, has written back.

The Network tells her that all of the recipients are doing well. “That makes me feel good,” McKeen said, “because they’re all taking care of our brother’s organs.”

Capser said she likes to tell her story to groups and, like McKeen, volunteers for the Network. “It is a very positive story for me,” she said, “living with diabetes, going through the transplant, living free of disease.”

She and McKeen urge everyone interested in donating organs to sign up on the Web site: www.donatelifecalifornia.org. The site provides a private registry for hospitals and doctors.
Capser also invites individuals and groups to call her for speaking engagements and information. She is available at (510) 758-8541 or by email at crystalhelene@comcast.net.

On her 40th birthday, Crystal Capser celebrates with the family of the late Juan Namowicz, whose transplanted kidney and pancreas saved her life. Capser is holding Namowicz’s daughter, Lorena.

Juan Namowicz with his daughter Lorena and son Isaac before his accidental death at age 24, when a tree fell on him.

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