Manitoba receives record number of organs from deceased donors

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This article was published 13/02/2019 (2663 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A simple tattoo poked above Lisa Boyd’s purple In-Memoriam T-shirt as she spoke about her decision to donate her son’s organs.

It said: ‘I’ll hold you in my heart until I hold you in heaven.”

Boyd told the tragic story of her son Tyler Klassen’s 2016 death in a car accident Wednesday as part of a press conference about organ transplants that announced Manitoba’s record number of deceased donors – 22 in 2018.

It was a bittersweet moment for the mother, who remains grief stricken.

“Tyler was the most compassionate, forgiving, empathetic, caring, loving respectful kind honest 16-year old with an infectious laugh and the handsomest most crooked grin ever,” Boyd said in an emotional speech.

What Boyd told the small audience at Health Sciences Centre was key to the reason for the press conference: “I knew my son’s decisions before his death … he told me if anything should ever happen to him and he couldn’t live anymore, he wanted to help others.”

Officials with the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and HSC applauded families like the Boyds.

“The Gift of Life program (has) resulted in a record number of Manitobans becoming donors and offers others a second chance at life, (and) this important work cannot be done alone,” WRHA chief operating officer Lori Lamont said.

HSC adopted a mandatory referral policy in 2014, which means all families of deceased patients are offered the opportunity to donate. Since then, the percentage of potential donors referred through the program has risen steadily, from 35 per cent that first year to 94 per cent in 2018.

The 22 families who donated loved ones’ organs after their deaths in 2018 was a record. There were 58 Manitobans that year who received kidney transplants at HSC. Twenty six of the organs came from living donors and another seven through the country’s national organ donor registry.

Gift of Life medical director Dr. Adrian Robertson said the program has a sign-up option online, which replaced the Manitoba driver’s licence former organ donation declaration.

But the doctor advised people to take additional steps and discuss organ donations with their families as well, as Tyler did with his mother.

“What we see at the bedside is those families who clearly know what their loved one would have wanted have a much easier time navigating this decision and very often that decision is ‘yes’, ” the doctor said.

Lesley Fox’s foster son, Ojula Opodhi, now 20, is alive because he received one of Klassen’s kidneys. She made that discovery through social media about the time of her son’s transplant.

Strict hospital provisions keep the names of donors and recipients confidential. The two mothers have kept in touch through Facebook since the transplant but they only met in person for the first time Wednesday.

Fox, meanwhile, said she and Boyd decided the press conference would be a perfect setting to meet each other. They sat quietly, side by side, at the press conference.

There aren’t enough words to describe what Boyd’s decision meant to the Fox family.

“It gave everybody (in the family) life again. He’s a great kid. He’s energized; he can eat anything he wants,” Fox said.

Through Facebook, Boyd said she’s also met another Winnipeg mother whose child received her son’s second kidney and another mother in Ontario whose child also received a transplant from Tyler. It comforts her knowing that a piece of Tyler lives on.

To give a sense of the difference an organ donation can make, HSC shared the podium with Conservative MLA (Brandon) Reg Helwer, whose daughter Jessica has received two separate kidney transplants from living donors in the last seven years.

In Manitoba, the only organs that are transplanted are kidneys. When family donates a relative’s organs, transplants for other organs — heart, lungs, pancreas and liver — are done elsewhere in the country and those donations are increasing.

About 200 people in Manitoba are waiting on kidney transplant lists at any given time and another 30 for heart, lungs and liver, HSC statistics show.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca