GIFT OF 5 LIVES
Family of Vancouver teacher killed in cycling accident consoled that her organs saved the lives of five others
Sue Hurn thinks about her daughter Amy every day. “That will never change,” she said.
But what helps console Hurn, her husband, Jerry, and her daughter Briony is that when her eldest daughter died four days after being hit by a car on her bicycle in 2012, Amy’s organs saved the lives of five other people and her corneas helped improve the eyesight of others.
“It provides solace, what solace there is,” Sue Hurn said.
She and Jerry were in Nepal when they got the news. They’d left their car with Amy, hoping she’d drive it at least once in a while, but Amy was an avid and adamant cyclist.
By late March, it’s no longer dark at 7:30 a.m., but it had rained the morning of the 27th in 2012. Taking her usual route to her job as a popular teacher and head of the science department at Vancouver Technical Secondary, Amy was crossing 12th Avenue at Windsor, a cyclist- and pedestrian-controlled intersection, when an eastbound car struck her.
“There were witnesses, it was deemed an accident,” Hurn said. “There was misjudgment on one part. Whose part, we’ll never know.”
Amy was kept alive for four days before being taken off life-support. Of the five people whose lives her organs saved, one received her lungs, two people received a kidney, one person her liver and one her pancreatic stem.
Hurn heard from one of them, the recipient of the lungs, a year after the accident. The letter of gratitude affected her so deeply that she had to put it away, then bring it out and put it away, time after time.
“It took a year to respond to him,” Hurn said. “I found it so moving, I reread and reread it.”
If you aren’t sure whether you’re a donor (or even if you are sure), it’s simple to go to the B.C. Transplant website to register or verify whether you already are. All you need is your B.C. personal health number.
It’s National Organ and Tissue Donation Awareness Week and the numbers are sobering. There are more than 600 people currently on organ waiting lists in B.C., according to B.C. Transplant. Nationwide, the number exceeds 4,600.
“Sadly, each year more than 250 Canadians who need a transplant die before receiving one,” Kimberly Young, Canadian Blood Services (CBS) director of donation and transplantation, said.
You are five to six times more likely to need an organ transplant than to become a deceased organ donor, according to CBS studies. And while 90 per cent of Canadians support organ donation, only about 50 per cent have taken the two minutes to register.
“So many people say they’re on-board,” Sue Hurn said. “But the actual number of signed-up people is a small fraction of that.”
Hurn appears before doctors’ boards at hospitals and works B.C. Transplant booths at public events, getting the word out, encouraging people to sign up as a donor if they haven’t already.
“It’s never something you want to say to parents, are your kids registered? But that is just as equally needed. You never know.”
“Each year more than 250 Canadians who need a transplant die before receiving one.” — Kimberly Young, Canadian Blood Services