Even the saddest of stories can have uplifting endings.
CALGARY TEENAGER SAVED LIVES THROUGH DONATIONS OF HER ORGANS
SHE WAS JUST ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE THAT HELPED EVERYBODY.
when Marit Mckenzie was in Grade 12, she watched as her best friend struggled with complications from a childhood liver transplant. It prompted the artsy, empathetic Alberta teenager to become an advocate.
Marit made her senior school project about the importance of organ donation. Then she went a step further, selling pieces of her artwork at the Otafest anime convention in Calgary, raising $500 for the david Foster Foundation, which works to financially support families of children undergoing an organ transplant.
Marit also asked her mother to co-sign her organ donor card.
For her parents, it was all typical of their daughter.
“She just always was aware of what was going on around her and engaged with the world and thoughtful about other people,” says her father, Bruce. “She was just one of those people that helped everybody.”
Her parents had no idea the impact their daughter’s selfless gesture would soon make on the lives of another family on the other side of the country, and several other families as well, helping the Mckenzies find meaning at perhaps the lowest moment of their lives.
In 2013, in her freshman year at the university of Calgary, Marit died suddenly. An acne medication is thought to have caused clots to restrict the flow of blood through her lungs, and resulted in a massive pulmonary embolism that led to four cardiac arrests.
When Marit passed, her heart was donated to Tanner Fitzpatrick, a 12-year-old hockey player from Newfoundland.
Tanner had been receiving treatment for dilated cardiomyopathy, an illness that causes the heart to become enlarged so that it cannot effectively pump blood to the rest of the body. Less than a year after Tanner became ill, doctors determined he would need a new heart.
Expecting the process to take some time, the Fitzpatricks headed to Toronto, where Tanner could be close to Sickkids Hospital should a heart become available. It took just days before the family received the call they were waiting for: there was a heart for Tanner.
“I would call it the purest shock I ever felt,” says Tanner, who now works as an electrician in Newfoundland. “It was something I’ve never felt again. It was a lot to process.”
Organ donation continues to be a difficult decision for Canadians, where 90 per cent of the population support organ donation, yet only 23 per cent register as donors, reports Canadian Blood Services. The low number of donors can translate into deadly consequences for the more than 4,500 people waiting for an organ donation — 260 of whom will die each year, according to The Organ Project, a not-for-profit founded by Eugene Melnyk, the owner and chairman of the Ottawa Senators hockey club. That’s about five deaths each week, or one death every 30 hours.
The organ most in demand is the kidney, reports the charity, with 76 per cent of Canadians on the waiting list in need of a kidney transplant. The liver is the next at 10 per cent, with lungs at six per cent. Another four per cent of those on the donation list are hoping to get a new heart. The average wait-listed kidney patient will wait four years for their new organ.
A donor, then, can have a sizable impact.
Marit’s heart, liver, pancreas and kidneys were successfully transplanted in four separate surgeries, according to the David Foster Foundation. Her donated corneas gave two more patients sight, while bone tissue and tendons were preserved for future reconstructive surgeries.
“One (organ donor) can save eight lives, or improve the life of 75 people,” says Michael Ravenhill, CEO of the David Foster Foundation. “That life legacy that they would leave, that anyone would leave, would be incredible.”
Bruce Mckenzie was not aware that Marit had decided to become an organ donor until the physicians asked if the parents would consider the transplants.
“He was a very brave man,” says Bruce of the physician who spoke to them that day.
“He said, ‘Would you consider organ donation?’ We’re sitting there, we’re just in shock. And Susan … said, ‘yes, this is what Marit wanted, she already had me sign in her donor card when she was 17.’
“What I understand is then the next day, the heart flew from Calgary to Toronto.”
The work of researchers, doctors and volunteers, as well as the selfless acts of living and deceased donors, is making a difference. In 2019, more than 3,000 transplants were performed from 1,434 donors, an increase from approximately 2,500 transplants from 1,212 donors in 2015, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
The waiting list also appears to be shrinking, down to 4,527 in 2019 from 4,712 in 2015.
Tanner’s surgery was a resounding success, and he was well enough to be discharged from Sickkids Hospital to the nearby ronald McDonald House after only a few days. He returned home to Newfoundland four months later.
The identity of organ donors and recipients is kept private in Canada, so the Fitzpatricks wrote an anonymous letter to Marit’s parents, and about a year later, they received a letter back from the Mckenzies, which alluded to a charity hockey match.
Tanner, by then much healthier and enduringly grateful, was compelled to do some internet sleuthing. He found the Marit Cup, an annual hockey tournament held by Marit’s high school that raises money for the David Foster Foundation, as well as for a fine arts scholarship in Marit’s name. Tanner, who had been in hockey since peewee, told his parents he wanted to play.
“I had to think about it,” Tanner says about meeting Marit’s parents. “But when it came around, I was hoping that they would appreciate seeing … what their daughter had done for me.”
A few years later, Tanner and his family attended the Marit Cup in Calgary. Tanner played goal.
“He played really good,” says Bruce. “It was a wonderful day.”
Watching the boy who received Marit’s heart on the ice was “stunning,” he says.
The Mckenzies have also connected with two other people whose lives were saved by Marit’s decision to become an organ donor.
“If anybody can take anything from my story,” says Tanner “(it is that) they could make one of these stories possible.”