Her husband, Tony, died in 1996 at age 35 when an undiagnosed brain tumor hemorrhaged and left him in an irreversible coma. D’Acquisto said the recipient of his liver — an Indiana man near death with a rare liver disease — had now been married more than 30 years and has three grown children.
And the Minnesota farmer who got one of Tony’s kidneys got his life back; he had spent three years traveling three hours a day three times a week for dialysis.
D’Acquisto, now remarried, says she continues to write and speak about organ donation as love’s greatest gift. Along with Schlueter, she was among more than 7,000 people who attended the Transplant Games last month in Madison, Wisconsin.
When Katie Coolican died, there was no follow-up care for families who donate the organs of their loved ones. After a few years of struggling with grief, her mother wrote about her experience in The American Journal of Nursing and began speaking about organ donation all over the country.
She went back to school, got a master’s degree and wrote a booklet, For Those Who Give and Grieve, that was published by the National Kidney Foundation. (The foundation also publishes a quarterly newsletter with that title, edited by D’Acquisto.)
“Katie’s had a wonderful legacy that continues to this day,” Coolican said.
In 1992 she founded the National Donor Family Council for the kidney foundation to help grieving families that donate loved ones’ organs and tissues. The two-year follow-up program she created for families has become a model for organ donation programs throughout the country.
(To read more “gift of life” stories about organ donation, see the Web site www.donatelifeny.org/gift/index.html.)
Who can give?
Do not rule yourself out as a potential donor because you think you may be too ill or too old. Only a few circumstances, like pervasive infection or active cancer, absolutely preclude organ donation, and there is no age limit. People in their 80s and 90s have been successful donors of certain tissues, as have newborns. But for anyone under 18, a parent or guardian must approve the donation.
Even if a person dies after an illness that precludes organ donation, or if too much time elapsed after death for organs to be viable, there is still the opportunity of whole-body donation to a medical college, where the body can be used in research or to help students learn anatomy.
While it is best to register one’s interest in whole-body donation with a medical school in advance of death, after death it is up to the next of kin to make it happen. You no longer own your body after you die. If this is something you would want for yourself, discuss it with your spouse and children, who must agree with your wishes.
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