There are plenty of lessons we can take from last September. One of them is that tomorrow isn’t a guarantee.
Each day, 3,000 North Texans awake to this fact: They’re awaiting organ transplants. And while they’re waiting, 16 people die nationally every day, according to averages compiled by the Dallas-based Southwest Transplant Alliance.
This month, we’re telling the stories of three neighborhood families impacted by organ transplants.
While their stories aren’t a direct result of 9/11, the impact is similar: Every day for these families, whether recipients or donors, is a gift.
Some of our neighbors have life today because of someone else’s death, and the organs they received are proof that at our most powerless, we may be our most powerful.
In October 1994, neighborhood residents Lynda and Jackson Harrell were visiting Arkansas when they received a call that changed their lives.
Their 21-year-old daughter, Leslie, a Lake Highlands High School graduate, was out for the night and had just dropped off some friends when something went wrong with her car. She walked to a nearby convenience store to call her boyfriend to pick her up and then headed back to the car.
“By the time he got there, he found the car, but he couldn’t find her,” Lynda says. Shortly after that, somebody in a pickup truck pulled up and yelled out to him: Do you know this girl?
Leslie Harrell was lying in the street, somewhere between 7-Eleven and her car, shot in the head.
By the time the police located the Harrells, Leslie was at the hospital on life support.
“It was the longest drive of my life,” says Lynda of the trip home. “She had been declared brain dead. We knew that before we left Arkansas, but somehow you just don’t…” she pauses.
“You think: Yeah, but it’ll be different if I get there.”
It wasn’t, of course, and not long after coming to terms with the fact they’d have to remove their daughter from life support, the Harrells faced another decision.
Though the Harrells had never had a conversation with Leslie about organ donation, they knew it was what she’d want.
“Leslie was very conscious of people’s needs and was always trying to help people. I want to say that she was always helping birdies with broken wings…those types of situations,” Jackson says.
“We just couldn’t imagine that if she couldn’t be here that she wouldn’t want to try to help somebody else.”
They told the hospital chaplain they wanted her organs donated. However, the medical examiner on duty quickly ruled out organ donation, claiming it could harm potential evidence in the investigation.
The Harrells couldn’t accept that.
“Given the circumstances (of Leslie’s death), I was just determined that something good was going to come out of this,” Lynda says. Jackson adds: “For us, it was also a way to, in a very small way, defeat the plans of whoever had killed her by letting a part of her live on.”
So the couple contacted friends who knew the county commissioner at that time and were able to get another medical examiner down to the hospital who ruled differently.
As a result of the Harrells’ decision, a woman in Plano received a liver and a woman from Austin, who was in the process of making her own funeral arrangements, received Leslie’s heart and lungs. The Austin woman lived five more years and welcomed two more grandchildren into the world. When the Harrells met her, Jackson says it was like “meeting a family member.”
“One really interesting thing was that Susan developed Leslie’s sneeze. Leslie did this little thing at the end where she would kind of bring air back in and make a little squeaking sound. It was funny, and we always had a laugh,” he says.
“We just grew to be tremendously fond of Susan,” Lynda says.
Because Leslie’s murder has never been solved, organ donation is the only comfort the Harrells can take from that period in their lives.
“There was a nurse at the hospital…who said to me: ‘There is someone out there tonight who is feeling as sad and hopeless as you are right now, and you’ve just made it possible for them to wake up happy in the morning.’ And I’ll always remember that.”
Adds Jackson: “It’s very rewarding to know that your family helped another family keep an important person alive. It’s just a very rewarding feeling that comes out of a very horrible situation.”
The Marathon Man / Mike Hyland knows what it’s like to wake up on the other side of a tragedy such as the Harrells’.
Hyland, who has lived in Lake Highlands with his wife, Delonna, since 1993, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when he was three months old. At the time, children with CF had a life expectancy of about 10 years. But the severity of CF cases often differs, and though Hyland had a lot of problems early on – including the removal of part of one lung – by the time he was a toddler, the disease had leveled off.
Until he reached college, Hyland lived what he calls “a pretty normal life.”
“But the ages of 18 to 31 were a slow downhill slide. I was your typical college student. I spent my time partying and studying…those are the things you do in college,” laughs Hyland, an easygoing guy. “So by the time I finished, my lungs had been damaged pretty well. Just living to age 22, somebody with CF is going to start having problems anyway.”
For eight years, Hyland’s life revolved around struggling against CF with regular and time-consuming breathing treatments.
“My schedule at the time pretty much consisted of getting up at 5:30 in the morning, doing an hour and a half of therapy, going to work, coming home and doing therapy for an hour. Then I’d have about an hour of free time, and then I’d do therapy for another hour before I’d go to bed.”
Just after his 30th birthday, he contracted bronchitis and spent two months in the hospital. His lung volume was down to about 15 percent and Hyland, whose doctor had been pressuring him to get on the transplant list for almost two years, began to seriously consider the operation.
“I thought: Okay, maybe you’re not as healthy as you think you are. It sounds sort of stupid, but that’s the way it was.”
He was put on the transplant list in May 1996 and received his transplant 11 months later. He says he never had much doubt he would make it.
“Honestly, I just sort of felt like I knew that I could say alive, and that was my only goal at the time. And once the time came for the transplant, it was pretty much out of my hands. I just sort of felt content with what was going to happen,” Hyland says.
He came through the transplant without too many complications but, when the time came to meet his donor’s family, his sense of calm evaporated.
His donor was a 14-year-old boy in Corpus Christi who had died of a brain aneurysm, and Hyland had been warned that local media were there to cover the meeting between him and the boy’s mother.
“We’re walking up the runway, and there’s like five TV cameras pointing up the ramp. I was a total blank; I couldn’t even think. I’ve never been that stressed out in my life,” he says, both laughing and tearing up at the memory of it.
But he and the donor family got through that first meeting and remain in touch to this day.
Amazingly, six months after his transplant, Hyland began running. At first, he says, “I wasn’t even able to run 100 yards.” But he kept working at it, eventually working his way up to a 5K five months after he started training. In 2000, he ran a marathon with his transplant surgeon, Dan Meyer, who has become a friend.
Because of some fairly recent rejection episodes that landed him back in the hospital, Hyland says he probably won’t run any more marathons.
“But I do intend to continue to do exercise every day. It’s important that I continue to do that. To keep not just my lungs, but my whole body, in shape.”
And, in the meantime, he’s often called upon by the Southwest Transplant Alliance to act as an advocate for pre-transplant patients and the general public.
“Prior to the transplant, I didn’t talk to people about CF or go out of my way to educate people,” he says. “But, knowing that there’s such a shortage of organ donors, it may be the only thing I can do to make a difference.
“If I can make people consider being an organ donor, then I feel like I’m doing something useful.”
Living Through Faith / Fae Harris is one of about 3,000 people in North Texas awaiting an organ that could transform her life. But that simple fact doesn’t tell the story of Harris, who has lived in Lake Highlands for three years.
In 1994, she was diagnosed with lupus after experiencing a frightening bout of high fever, hair loss and severe joint pain. Two successive doctors recommended chemotherapy treatments to kill the cells causing her lupus.
After nearly two years of chemotherapy, Harris says she was still having some pain, but that she put her “trust in the Lord. I believe that God can heal your body if you believe. And I do believe.”
As the years went on, her pain subsided and she thought she might be in the clear. Then, in the early part of 1999, she came down with a fever of nearly 105 degrees that landed her in the hospital. She stayed there for a month while doctors performed all manner of tests to figure out what was wrong. At some point, she was given penicillin and went into anaphylactic shock and almost died.
Then, after tests showed unusually high creatine levels, Harris finally got a diagnosis.
“They came to me and said, ‘Your kidneys are failing.’ They said it was because of lupus, but I felt it was because of all that chemotherapy or a combination possibly of both of those.”
“I remember leaving the doctor’s office, and I was in tears, and I remember praying…I went to a little park, sat by a tree and started writing a letter to God.”
Harris immediately started dialysis three times a week and was put on the list for new kidneys in May 1998. But a few months later, tragedy struck again.
She noticed a lump in her breast and went in for a mammogram, which led to a sonogram and, finally, a biopsy.
After the biopsy, Harris says she remembers “leaving there in tears and I was thinking: Don’t cry, because if you cry, it’s going to make what they’re saying true.”
Days later, her doctor called her at her mother’s house, where she’d been staying due to her recent illnesses, with the results.
“She said, ‘Miss Harris I’m sorry to tell you it is cancer.’”
“I remember going to our living room and sitting in the chair, and I put my head down, and I was thinking: I need to be tearing up something, knocking something down, putting holes in the wall, something…but I had a peace.
“I remember when I was a little girl, my grandmother would be singing in the midst of trials and tribulations, she’d always be singing songs to the Lord. And I used to think: She can’t be that happy. But at that moment, I thought about that, and I had that peace that says if you trust in Jesus Christ you’ll have that peace that is far beyond human understanding.”
Harris had a mastectomy and went through another, much stronger, round of chemotherapy. Worse yet, she was removed from the transplant list because of her cancer. The anti-rejection drugs given to post-transplant patients are incompatible with recent cancer survivors. She was told she couldn’t be placed back on the list for another five years.
Then, in November 2000, Harris’ mother, whom she was still living with and was her main source of support, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm.
“The night before she got sick, I was coming out of my bedroom, and she was coming out of her bedroom, and we both met at the door to the living room and my spirit said: Hug your mama. So I hugged her and said, ‘Mama, I love you.’ And she said, ‘I love you, too, Fae.’”
“Out of all the things that I went through, the most devastating one was the death of my mother.”
Though she still wasn’t officially back on the waiting list, the doctors tested her mother’s kidneys to see if Harris could receive them. Though the kidneys were unsuitable due to kidney stones, her mother’s liver did go to a donor.
“I was overjoyed by the fact that someone else could be alive because of my mom,” she says.
Harris has a little more than a year before she can be put back on the list for new kidneys. In the meantime, she continues her dialysis treatments, walks two miles five times a week, and looks the picture of good health. She runs a support group for women who’ve survived breast cancer and lupus, and serves as an advocate for the 30 or so people who share her shift at the dialysis center.
She also has a daughter in Austin and two brothers and a sister who give her emotional support. Her daughter, 28-year-old Qainta, would like to do more than that.
“My daughter has been constantly: ‘Mom, when are you gonna check to see what I need to do to give you a kidney?’ I don’t want to take her kidney.
“I don’t know how long it will take, but I believe we go through things in our lives to help us grow stronger spiritually. God has healed me through so many other things. I’m just trusting in the Lord to do that.”
