Hunt for recipients of partner’s organs
A woman whose crash-victim partner’s organs changed six lives, now wants those recipients to track her down.
Riley Baker, a 26-year-old Dunedin photographer, was severely injured in a crash with a tourist driver on State Highway 1, near the Shag Point turnoff between Palmerston and Moeraki, on August 13, 2016.
He later died in hospital but not before his organs were donated to six recipients.
His partner, Amy McCarthy, told Stuff one of those recipients was just 12 months old at the time of the transplant.
In the two years since Baker’s death, she had received one update email advising her that all the organ recipients were doing well.
McCarthy, who is studying to be a nurse, was in class when the topic of organ donation was discussed, and ‘‘I started wondering how those people are doing’’.
‘‘I have this feeling that I can’t really explain, I just want to meet one of them to help with my closure.’’
That prompted an online post asking recipients to get in contact with her.
"I am not trying to track people down, I’m saying: I’m here, track me down.’’
McCarthy said she read an article about an American father who travelled from one coast to the other to listen to his late son’s heart beating in the chest of a recipient.
‘‘I want to see that these people are getting the life that they deserve ... and knowing Riley is out there in six different people and that is a really nice thought.’’
She had the support of Baker’s family in her quest.
Organ Donation New Zealand said that under current legislation it was an offence to disclose information concerning the deceased, the use of retrieved organs and tissues, and information about recipients.
However, that legislation did not prevent families and others from disclosing or actively seeking information in order to identify donors or recipients.
Donation agencies discouraged these meetings due to concerns about ‘‘unforeseen psychoemotional ramifications’’, a spokeswoman said.
The organisation declined to release details about which of Baker’s organs were donated and the age of recipients.
Last year there were 73 deceased organ donors in New Zealand, with about 500 people waiting for a kidney at any one time, and 50 to 60 people waiting for a liver, heart or lung transplant.
Many more people need tissue – corneas, heart valves and skin – transplants.
The fatal crash driver, Limin Ma, who paid the family an emotional harm payment of $30,000, was sentenced to 150 hours of community work and disqualified from holding a driver’s licence for two years when he was sentenced in the Dunedin District Court in September 2016.