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The Greatest Gift

Organ Donation Brings Life and New Hope

December 18, 2006

The Greatest Gift • MOD Squad Helps Families Make the Greatest Gift • Strangers to the Rescue: Living Organ Donations • "Angels From God:" Stories of Organ Donation • Organ Donation: How It Works • A Critical Need • Organ and Tissue Facts • Transplant Timeline --- • Study Eyes Payments for Living Organ Donors • Wealthy Saudi Received Liver Transplant Ahead of Other Patients • AMA Hopes to Increase Organ Donations • New Safeguards for Living Organ Donors

It's been said that love is the greatest gift. Or is it life? Certainly, it is love that initiates and often sustains life, and there are those who would say that life without love is not worth living.

These arguments might be mere semantics but when it comes to organ donation, it is love -- whether it's for an individual recipient or simply for humanity -- that carries the day. There are many conditions for which organ donation is not only the best cure but the only one. In other cases, an organ transplant immeasurably improves the quality of life for the recipient -- and, sometimes, for the donor or the donor's family.

Organ donors, very simply, are heroes. They give of themselves to help others, getting nothing of material value in return.

This holiday season, we've collected a number of stories that tell of the struggles and rewards of organ donors, their families, the recipients and those who work to help families in crisis.

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• The MOD Squads "How do I live without my son? Tell me how to do that," cried a mother who'd just been told her son was brain-dead following a motorcycle accident. Margaret Syrett of the MOD -- or "Mothers of Organ Donors" -- Squad knew she couldn't fix the unfixable. But Syrett had been there -- her six-year-old son Ricky suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage while playing with friends in his backyard. Now she and others like her help families assist others even as they deal with their own grief and loss. Read more.

• Strangers to the Rescue A man in England reads of an Israeli girl dying in a St. Louis hospital. He quits his job and flies to St. Louis, where he undergoes risky surgery to donate a lobe of his liver. Insane? Or heroic? Surgeons who once dismissed organ donation by living strangers are increasingly embracing it as the ultimate act of a Good Samaritan. Some major medical centers now report that more than half their transplants involve living donors. Read more.

• "Angels From God" Suzanne Eckler's husband Bobby, 59, kissed her good-bye and went off to work one morning, never to return. He died later that day of a fatal brain hemorrhage. But Bobby walked the earth for many more years, as Suzanne sees it, helping two children see, weaning two diabetics off dialysis and saving the life of a young mother of two who danced the father's dance with Bobby's daughter when she was married years later. Then there is Miss Wisconsin, who became a physician after watching her father die after four years of waiting for a kidney transplant. Read more.

Many of the articles in this special section, those by Joan Lisante and Jim Hood, have appeared elsewhere in slightly different form but the story they tell is as true today as ever. It is a story of grief and loss giving way to acts of love and compassion that touch countless other lives.

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