Melynk sheds light on ordeal
Eugene Melnyk has shared more details about his life-saving liver transplant.
Melnyk wrote a piece for The Players’ Tribune, posted Monday, about the shock of learning from Dr. Atul Humar at the Toronto’s University Health Network that he needed a new liver, and what he went through when he first arrived at the hospital in January 2015 until he had the procedure in May 2015.
Melnyk told The Players’ Tribune the thought of needing a transplant never crossed his mind when he was told by the doctors how ill he really was.
“Liver transplant. Those were two words that I just never expected to hear. There wasn’t much room for interpretation anymore,” Melnyk said in the article. “My first thought — my immediate gut reaction — was to dismiss it all. Like, come on, this has to be some kind of joke.”
Melnyk said he didn’t want to make the public plea for a liver that was launched in late May and resulted in the anonymous donor that saved his life. “At that point, I had only a matter of days left, which is when my associates told me that my options were to either make a public plea for a living donor or die,” Melnyk said. “To me, it didn’t seem worth it to ask. I’d kept everything private up to that point, and I didn’t want to court sympathy. The whole process had taken such a toll on me physically and emotionally that it had sapped me of my will to live.
“So I prepared to die. I began making arrangements to sort out my estate with my lawyer. And for the first time, I thought about how I was going to say goodbye to the people I loved. All of this was taking place at the same time that my beloved Ottawa Senators went on a wild winning streak to make the playoffs in 2015. Did I care? Absolutely. Could I stay up to watch the games? No. All my focus was on getting a liver.”
Melnyk said his daughters, Anne and Olivia, changed his mind about whether the club should go public or not.
“If all the decisions had been left up to me, I probably would have died shortly after that. But my life wasn’t just about me,” Melnyk wrote. “As I said before, my kids are smart. They knew what was going on, and they knew that their dad was ready to quit. And my daughters, Anna and little Olivia, weren’t going to accept that.”
Part of the reason Melnyk penned the article was to bring attention to The Organ Project he launched in February. He has worked hard to bring more awareness to organ donation so that people aren’t forced to go through what he had to endure.