Donate Life Presentation - David lively's testimony

Before I get too far along, our son, Adam, was a donor at Johnson City Medical Center. I wanted to -- I've never really had a chance to thank the people of Johnson City Medical Center for the kindness, and the understanding and the patience that they showed us and our families and friends during the hardest time of our lives. So I wanted to thank you very much. Fifteen years ago, on the 16th of January, Barbara and I were-had gone to sleep and we got the phone call that a parent never really wants to get. It was from a nurse at the emergency room at the medical center. I answered the phone and she said -- asked if I was the parent of Adam Lively, and I said yes. She said "there's been an accident" and I said "how bad?" and she said "you need to come". So, Barbara got the jist of the conversation, we jumped in the car, and started the trip from Kingsport to johnson city, and about halfway between boones creek exit and the gray exit, there are two bridges, and on the second bridge, there was a toyota landcruiser sitting upside down in the middle of the road, and we judged by the timeliness of our trip and the phone call that this was the accident. And Adam, and six other boys were in the car. The young man that was driving lost control and an animal had run out in front of him and he lost control and the car rolled. Five of the boys had on seatbelts, two didn't. Adam was one of the ones that did have his seatbelt on and he hit his head, and he had what was called a close skull fracture. So I want to show you a picture real quick of what an organ donor looks like. This is Adam Fletcher Lively. Adam is forever 22. We miss him every day. We had our Easter family celebration last night, and there's always an empty seat. They transported Adam to the medical center by helicopter and we got here really not too long after that. They escorted us to the emergency room. It was full of children -- children -- young people, college students and they were friends of Adam and the people that were in the automobile with him. The chaplain found us and escorted us to a little room off to the side and we sat and waited for a little bit of time for us to be able to see Adam. It took about 45 minutes or so before we -- you all are familiar with the emergency room with nurses' station in the center and the little cubicles around the outside. Adam was in the #1 place and he was hooked to about everything you could imagine. And they told us that Adam's condition was pretty severe and the battle began to keep him alive. The dangerous brain-swelling to where as if there is brain bleeding, the brain swells and it cuts off blood flow to the tissue and then the person becomes brain dead. As you all know, there is a difference between brain dead and a coma -- a coma you can come back from, brain death you don't. And so, over that four day period, we stayed in the waiting room -- the intensive care waiting room, sleeping on the floor and recliners and everything you can imagine and every few minutes, we would get a chance to go in and visit with Adam and our instructions to start with were not to talk to him, to keep the stimulation down, try and keep the brain swelling down. They did surgery on him on Saturday, they took a section out of the side of his skull and vacuumed out some blood clots that had formed. On Tuesday, the 20th, we were invited to come into the intensive care unit, and the nurse told us that overnight the battle had been lost. Adam's brain had swelled to the point that he had become brain dead. At that point we were approached by Dwight Westler. I'm not sure whether he still works at the emergency room at Johnson City Medical Center or not, but he was our nurse and he asked us if we had ever considered organ donation. I told Dwight that yes we had because six weeks before Adam's accident, he told his mom that if anything ever happened to him, that he wanted to be an organ donor. And so, when we were sitting in that little room, somewhere near the icu, trying to make that decision, Adam had already made it for us, and that's an indication of how important it is, that whether a person is willing to be an organ donor or not, they need to tell their family, so that they don't go through the anguish of trying -- we would have donated adam's organs anyway, I'm convinced. But having his permission in advance made it so much easier for us. So about the time that we were talking with Dwight, a plane left the Memphis airport on the way to Kingsport , and I want to introduce you to a second person, this is Adam's heart recipient. It's not really a very good picture of Ken. Ken lives in Crowder, Mississippi. He had a disease called cardiomyopathy. Your heart loses pumping capacity, and like ken said, his heart looked like an old baseball glove. It just wasn't working very well. He had been on a left-ventricular device. It's a heart pump, basically to keep him alive until a heart became available. Well, he was in Baptist hospital in Memphis for nine months, waiting for a heart transplant. Ken had two false starts. The call went out to Katherine in Crowder, that a heart was going to be available. So Katherine jumped off in the car and took off from Crowder back up to Memphis to the hospital. They got Ken all ready for surgery, and the family had decided to donate everything but the heart. I can't imagine the rollercoaster that they had gone through to think that it was going to be available and then to find out it wasn't going to be available. The second time, they had -- Katherine got the phone call, she took off from Crowder to Baptist Hospital, and the weather had been so bad that they couldn't get the plane out of the Memphis airport and so they had diverted the heart to a different recipient. We had a chance to meet Ken and Katherine in Gatlinburg about a year and a half after Adam's donation, and it was a pretty emotional experience. I couldn't quite bring myself to put my hand on Ken's chest, to feel Adam's heart beating, but it was funny -- Barbara said- told Ken if we had a choice we would have rather met them on different circumstances and Ken agreed that he really did not want to be needing a heart. But they were a fine couple, Ken's doing fine, he's now 63 years old, I believe. Doing well, he has two grandchildren that he loves dearly, likes to fish, he's an Ole Miss fan, he said he had a little bit of a kidney problem that he seems to have overcome but he's doing well. The last person I want to introduce you to is Haley Vincent. Haley is forever 11 years old. Haley had been sick with liver problems all of her life, she had been in and out of hospitals, mostly in. And about four years ago -- last October, Haley died. And so I think that this is - the reason that I brought the pictures were to show you the three faces of organ donation -- someone who had been a donor, a willing donor, someone who had been a recipient, and then someone who was on that list of 115,000 people, who died waiting. And so, I would really encourage you to consider organ donation. There are several different ways that you can become an organ donor -- when you have your license renewed, you can tell the people there at the DMV to check the little box that when you get your driver's license it will have the little heart on the bottom of it. You can google Tennessee donor services and it will give you the website -- I never can remember what it is, so I'm cheating a little bit. But if you google Tennessee donor services, then it will give you the website that you can sign up online and you can sign up today if you want to. But I really appreciate the time that you've given me today and for us, I have a ritual on the 16th of January, that I come to Kingsport, go through the ICU and say a prayer for the people in the waiting room, and if a helicopter is out there, go out and touch the nose, just to keep it fresh in my own mind -- those days that we spent in johnson city medical center. It was -- and maybe it's not protocol to tell you about it -- but there must have been 50-75 kids waiting in the cafeteria just for word about what adam's condition was. The hospital allowed them, when it became apparent that Adam wasn't going to get any better, that they allowed each one of the kids, two at a time to go up into the intensive care unit and say goodbye. And so it meant so much for us to have that -- maybe this is the wrong place to say it, but bending the rules, and maybe it wasn't but it sure was good for us and I'll be forever grateful. I appreciate the time and thank you all very much.