Local woman making Miss Universe-Canada bid
Taylor shining spotlight on need for organ donors
The bikini event isn’t nearly as revealing as the reasons Emmerson Taylor will be competing in the Miss Universe-Canada pageant. The young Prince George woman is stepping into the spotlight not to flaunt or to strike a pose. She’s actually not thinking of herself at all. “I thought it would be fun to do something very different in my life,” said the nearly 19-year-old nursing student. “But my sole motivation was knowing the spotlight the Miss Universe-Canada event offers to the competitors. If I get to speak on a national stage, I have something important to talk about.”
And that something important was sitting across the dining room table fighting tears and beaming with pride at the same time. Taylor’s mother, Lisa Ouellet, has for years been waging a battle with her own body. Ouellet needs a new liver. There aren’t many out there.
There could be a lot more, Taylor believes, if only Canadians fully realized their ability to be organ donors in the event of their death and the ability to be living donors for some organs. That’s especially true of the liver, due to recipients only needing a portion of a donor’s liver in many cases.
“Six hundred people in B.C. right now need a transplant,” said Taylor. “Speaking up about my mom is important because all 600 of these people are somebody’s mom or dad or child.
“There were 423 transplants done in B.C. last year and none of the was for the liver, even though it’s the easiest one to give.”
The family has obtained other facts about organ donation and the numbers tell a tragic story. Since 2014, almost 40 people in this province died waiting for an organ that never came. While 21 northern residents got a transplant last year, only seven deceased people had set up their organ donation permission.
According to their research – and this family has done a lot of it since discovering Ouellet’s autoimmune disease several years ago – a great many British Columbians think they are set up to be organ donors simply by ticking a box on a form or applying a sticker to their driver’s license or writing a note they keep in their wallet.
To do so properly, go to www.transplant. bc.ca, click the “Register Your Decision” heading, have your B.C. Personal Health number ready, and follow the simple steps.
Organ donation can occur in only about one per cent of deaths. The circumstances are rigid. However, one donor can save as many as eight lives.
But you can’t do a national speech on organ donation if you can’t get on stage. Taylor had to earn her way into the Miss Universe-Canada fold, and she did it through a number of written and oral exams this winter.
She is now one of six British Columbians, and the only one from the north, to win a spot in the national competition coming up this summer.
Taylor never believed herself to be pageant material. She’s more of an athletic, studious type by nature, but she was pleasantly surprised by how this event has progressed with modern understanding of female empowerment.
“When I looked at the other competitors I saw women of colour, different languages, one was wearing a hijab, different body types, everyone had a different background,” Taylor said.
“It’s about striving with new confidence to be the best you can be.”
Taylor will have some travel expenses to generate through public fundraising (there is already a contribution page in her name on the GoFundMe website), but that’s only money. What she really wants to raise is the number of organ contributions made from everyday Canadians to other everyday Canadians.