by Cersei Morrow

Created on: March 11, 2007   Last Updated: May 05, 2007

Organ donation is a very personal issue for me. Since the age of 7 one of my best friends, Pam, lived with the diagnoses of "Idiopathic Pulmonary Hemosiderosis". Essentially this meant the capillaries in her lungs broke, and bled, resulting in scar tissue and decreased lung capacity.

In 1991 Pam was a freshman in college. She was on oxygen 24 hours a day, delivered by a tracheostomy tube in her throat. She had lived through a lot of suffering in her young life, but Pam remained beautiful, bright, full of fun, and always ready for a challenge.

She was given that challenge when her doctors informed her the scar tissue was growing to great to allow her lungs to provide her body with the oxygenation she needed. She needed a double lung transplant or she would die.

Pam was hesitant about the transplant she needed. True to form, it hurt her to think that someone would have to lose their life in order for her own to be saved. Reality soon set in, and she knew organ donation was her only chance. Lung transplant was the only thing that could enable her not only to live, but to full fill her dream of becoming an art teacher, a missionary, a mother. New lungs would mean she could do something as simple as run. She hadn't been able to do that since the age of 7.

Pam was placed on the organ donor list, her family and friends immediately launched a full scale fund raiser to generate money for the cost of the operation. In Pam's own words "Being on the list, and waiting for the transplant is so important . . . It gives me hope. Even if I don't get it in time, I'm just sitting around waiting to die, and that's no way to live."

Sadly, Pam died before a transplant was available. She knew her time was near, and through her strong faith, she was ready. Before her death she made the decision to donate what organs she could to others in need.

Pam's choice to donate her own organs gave someone the gift of sight through her eyes. Her bone marrow may have cured a leukemia patient. Her skin prevented a burn patient dying from infection. In those people, Pam continues to live.

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