Nine lives

That’s Tracey and Emerald.

While Whitney and I were training at the Seeing Eye last month, the PR people interviewed a few of us for a short one-minute promotional video. You can link to the video on YouTube, but get out your Kleenex first – it’s downright heartwarming. And be sure to watch from beginning to the very end, otherwise you’ll miss a quick snippet of fellow Seeing Eye graduate Tracey Melchiorre, who more or less bookends the video. Tracey is a feisty gal with a Texas accent, and she’s alive and well today thanks to a young man who believed in organ donation.

Tracey was diagnosed with Type 1, or juvenile, diabetes, when she was eight years old. She lost her sight in 1991, when she was 24. A year later, she met Mike Melchiorre at a Houston Rockets game — they fell in love, got married, took classes to become certified as foster parents, and adopted Elijah, who they had fostered as an infant. Elijah is seven years old now, but he was still a toddler when diabetes started damaging Tracey’s kidneys. She was on dialysis for a year and a half before receiving a kidney and pancreas transplant. “It was on July 27, 2008, not that I remember the exact date or anything!” she says with a happy laugh.

Like Tracey, I was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes when I was a kid, and over the years, friends have asked if I might consider a pancreas transplant. It’s true a pancreas transplant might offer a “cure” for type 1 diabetes, but many physicians are reluctant to transplant a pancreas alone for diabetes without renal failure. The reason? Side effects of the immunosuppressant drugs required after transplantation are more detrimental than the complications of diabetes.

When someone like Tracey (who had severe kidney damage due to type 1 diabetes) is experiencing renal failure, doctors reason they may as well combine a pancreas transplant with

There’s Elijah the Rockets fan with a Yao Ming bobblehead. Thanks to a young man who donated his organs, Elijah’s mom is living a healthy life.

a kidney transplant. That way you end up with a healthy kidney, plus a pancreas that won’t damage it anymore.

Being a transplant recipient is great, Tracey would tell me. “No more diabetes or kidney problems!” At the same time, she readily acknowledged that she’d exchanged one set of challenges with another. I’d hear her alarm go off twice a day to remind her to take her anti-rejection medication, and she still has regular doctor visits and blood tests and a compromised immune system to deal with.

So while I envied the way she could eat desserts at dinner without worrying how much extra insulin to inject to “cover” the extra carbs, or how she’d scurry out to the Seeing Eye shuttle bus without pricking her finger to check her blood sugar level first, or never had to pat her pockets to confirm she had a glucose tablet along, you know, in case of a low blood sugar en route, I am hopeful my kidneys stay healthy and I never need a transplant.

I have a brother-in-law who has been on dialysis for over a year. He’s still waiting for a kidney donor. He is not a complainer, but I know dialysis is tedious and tiring. When I asked Tracey what got her through all those months and months on dialysis, she said, “God brought Elijah into our lives at just the right time to keep us going and smiling.” She also credits her church family, who provided prayers and food, and her parents, who helped almost daily. My brother-in-law seems buoyed when he’s with his family, but he tires easily and is not able to travel as much as he used to. We are all hopeful he gets news of a donor match soon.

Tracey’s pancreas and kidney came from a 23-year-old man in the Carolinas, and she is grateful that young man believed in organ donation. She told me she doesn’t know much about his background, or his family. “I only know about his mother, and that she loved him.” In a thank you note to this young man’s mother, Tracey said that the transplant will add an indefinite number of years to her life, and healthy years at that. “I told her about Elijah, and how my son will grow up having a healthy mommy who can go to his games, cook his meals and take care of him.”

Signing up to be an organ donor is much easier than you might think. A web site called Donate Life America provides a list of where to register in your state, and United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) provides an easy-to-read fact sheet dispelling common myths about organ donation.

One thing I learned from that list: a history of medical illness does not prevent you from donating organs, and neither does old age. With recent advances in transplantation, many more people than ever before can be donors, and while it’s good to sign up to be an organ and tissue donor on your driver’s license, it’s best to sign an official donor document, too.

Tracey says the most important thing to do if you want to be a donor is to tell your family your wishes. She doesn’t have information on how many other lives were changed by this young man’s decision to become a donor, but she did tell me this: a single donor can save up to nine lives, and improve the lives of as many as 50 people.