Gift eases grief for donors’ families

Rugby death reveals benefits of organ cards

The night before her 17-year-old daughter was taken off life support, Kathleen Stringer climbed into her intensive-care bed.

She rested her head on Rowan’s right shoulder, then wrapped her arm around her body. She sang lullabies, the way she used to whenever her daughter would fuss as a baby.

Rowan, who had suffered a catastrophic head injury during a high school rugby match, was declared brain dead at noon the next day — Sunday, May 12, 2013. Mother’s Day. That night, she was wheeled into an operating room, where surgeons retrieved the Ottawa teen’s heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, kidneys and corneas in what her parents call Rowan’s final act of kindness.

Life-saving transplants have been in the headlines recently: from the liver transplants for twin Vietnamese-Canadian toddlers to Ottawa Senators’ owner Eugene Melnyk’s public plea for a live liver donation. New research also shows people with cystic fibrosis who receive new lungs can now expect to live at least 10 years more.

Less often told is the other side — the story of the donors’ families who agree to give life, as they grieve their own unimaginable loss.

Ne w data from Ontario show more and more people are becoming organ donors and the number of transplants is growing.

“We’re seeing the number of actual transplant recipients increase; we’re seeing the number of hospitals who routinely notify us of potential donors increase,” said Ronnie Gavsie, president and chief executive officer of the Trillium Gift of Life Network.

Yet some stark statistics remain. As of Monday, 1,629 Ontarians were on the most “medically urgent” wait list for a transplant. “Behind them lie hundreds more,” Gavsie said.

But up to three-quarters of families do not know their relatives’ wishes Gavsie said.

“Families will tell you it was much easier to decide to donate when they know what their loves ones wanted.”

The day her driver’s licence arrived in the mail, Rowan sat at the kitchen table, filled out the donor registration card, stamped it and walked to the mailbox.

“As a family we talked about the importance of transplant, about the fact that, once you’re dead, you don’t need your organs anymore” said Kathleen, who is a dialysis nurse.

It was important, she said, for the girls to know their parents’ wishes, “that if it ever came to it, they would donate our organs.” Kathleen and her husband Gordon never imagined one day asking doctors to grant their child’s wish to do the same.

On May 8, 2013, during a rugby match, Rowan was grabbed and thrown hard to the ground in an illegal “swing tackle.” She landed on her head, sat up for a second, then fell back to the ground. She never regained consciousness.

The teen had told friends in texts days before she suspected she had a concussion after being hit in an earlier game. She died of second-impact syndrome, in which a concussed person has a second concussion before recovering fully from the first.

Kathleen was on a business trip in Brandon, Man., when she got a string of messages to call home. Gordon explained the surgeons had to remove a flap of Rowan’s skull to try ease the pressure from her swelling brain.

Kathleen asked the doctors to put the phone beside Rowan’s ear. “Stay strong, little Row,” she told her. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

When she arrived in the pediatric intensive-care (ICU) unit at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Rowan was out of surgery. There was a bandage on the left side of her head and a tube down her throat connecting her to a ventilator. “But her little face,” Kathleen remembers, “looked just perfect.”

Then, as she absorbed what the doctors were telling her, the mother felt her panic rising. “I knew she was not going to make it. When you’re a nurse, you know enough of the language to understand.”

CT scans revealed the swelling in Rowan’s brain was so massive, it was squeezing off blood vessels, starving the tissue of oxygen. The damage was spreading from the left side of her brain to the right.

“There was so much damage done to her brain that she would never have been Rowan again,” Kathleen said.

In the months after her death, as the family moved through what Kathleen can only describe as a “terrible shocking daze,” anonymous letters began arriving from the people who received Rowan’s organs, including a thank-you from a 13-year-old boy who received one of her kidneys.

The transplant had freed him from nightly dialysis. It meant he could go on his first sleepover, “And Rowan always loved sleepovers,” she said.

Agreeing to donate Rowan’s organs helped bring a measure of comfort from “such a terribly tragic, sad thing.

“It’s exciting to think that parts of Rowan are actually still alive,” she said. “She’s not completely gone.”