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Donors Float celebrates life

By Maxine Hunter
We have just celebrated Christmas with material gifts to friends and loved ones, but in tomorrow's New Year's Day Rose Bowl Parade, one float will celebrate another type of gift - the gift of life.
The 2009 Donors Float will carry floral photographs of 38 people nationwide whose deaths brought life to others. Among the 38 will be the floragraph of Bolton High School senior Rachel Escue, who would have graduated in May 2008 had not a tragic accident taken her life. The lovely, red-haired Rachel had everything to live for, but when she died, parents Mark and Jencie Escue honored her wishes and agreed to donate her organs to the Mid-South Transplant Foundation. Because of that decision, five persons lived who might have died.
Mark and Jencie, along with their other daughter Jamie, will be in Pasadena tomorrow, watching their daughter's floragraph pass by on the float.
Terry and Mindy Fischer, watching the parade from their Germantown home, will feel something of the emotions the Escues are feeling. They, too, lost a child, and they, too, chose to turn their son Will's loss into victory for another family.
Will was just two years old when he died December 20, 1999. He had undergone a seizure five days before and was on a ventilator at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital when he suffered a stroke with massive brain damage. He was on life support for 48 hours.
“We knew where it was progressing,” Mindy Fischer said this week of that time nine years ago. “Actually we were the ones who thought of it. One of our good friends had a child who was going to have to have a kidney transplant to live, and Terry said, ‘What if we gave Will's kidney to him?'
“Will would have died anyway, and when we signed those papers we knew we were giving life to someone else's child. It has always been so reassuring to me that, much as Will's life meant to Terry and me, his death made a huge impact on others' lives. He saved five lives and restored sight to two others.”
One of Will's kidneys went to a man exactly one week older than his father Terry, and Terry and Mindy have been able to meet him and talk with him. “It was a very powerful experience to be in the physical presence of this man that Will gave back his life,” Mindy said.
“We can't say enough about Le Bonheur's care for Will and for the Mid-South Transplant group and the respect with which they treated Will.”
Since Will's death, Mindy and Terry have been blessed by the birth of two other children, son Matthew, age 7-1/2, and daughter Meg, age 6.
Other Germantown people have been on the receiving end of the Mid-South Transplant Organ Donor program and can testify to its life-giving program. Jerry Grisham, Germantown CPA, received a liver from a Millington teenager killed in a car crash two years ago come February 19.
“Jerry is doing wonderfully,” his wife Terri said last week. “We couldn't ask for more.”
“The Lord has blessed me,” Grisham said. “The only sad part is the young teenager who lost his life. Jacob Smith was from all accounts a fine young man who was going into medicine in order to be a missionary nurse. He had told his parents he wanted to be an organ donor. If he hadn't said it, they would never have agreed to it. But it made all the difference to me.”
Jacob Smith was one of the honorees whose floragraph was displayed on last year's Donor's Float, Grisham said. In addition to the liver, Smith's mother also gave two kidneys and corneas to the organ donor program.
The donation of the liver made all the difference for him, Grisham said. “The doctor told my wife after my surgery that without the liver transplant, I could not have lived more than two weeks longer.”
Today Grisham, a 1966 graduate of Germantown High School, travels extensively in his work as a CPA and lives life to the fullest. His wife and four children (three daughters and a son) are grateful to still have him with them.
Grisham has had the opportunity to meet with Jacob Smith's mother and grandmother and thank them personally for the gift of life.
“I'm still here, thanks to them,” he said.
Among other Germantown people who are living because of organ donors are Lindsay Grills, liver transplant; Pat Weaver, liver transplant; Ed Thomas, kidney transplant; James Ballentine, heart transplant; Joseph Cooper, heart transplant; and Perry Hayes, who just recently received a heart transplant. All these people are healthy because someone cared enough to donate body organs or tissue.
Weaver, who had a liver transplant in June ‘05 said, “I am alive today because someone donated. Anything I can do to promote organ donations, I will gladly do it. I am 69 years old and in good health now. I can get down on the floor and play with my grandchildren. But I would have died within days if I had not had the transplant. If somebody donates, somebody else will live. If they don't, someone who might have lived will die. It's just that simple.”
Tennessee now has a state registry on which one can register to be a donor. For information on organ and tissue donations, visit tndonorregistry.org or call the Mid-South Transplant Foundation at 328-4438.

Donors Float celebrates life
We have just celebrated Christmas with material gifts to friends and loved ones, but in tomorrow's New Year's Day Rose Bowl Parade, one float will celebrate another type of gift - the gift of life.
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