The Power of One Community – Ketchikan, Alaska
AUGUST 9, 2010
The ENTIRE community had to pull together to make one of LifeCenter Northwest’s most amazing (and true) donor stories happen. It was the middle of an Alaskan winter, and a horrible blizzard could not have come at a worse time. The airport was closed, and we were in the middle of managing an organ donor at Ketchikan General Hospital. For those of you not familiar with Alaskan geography, the only way in or out of the island community of Ketchikan is by plane or boat. More than 900 miles north of the nearest transplant center, a plane was the only option that would get the life saving organs to the waiting recipients in time. We were at a standstill. Time was running out, but the blizzard was far from over. Then, to make matters even worse, there was a large scale earthquake somewhere west of us in the Pacific Ocean. Now Ketchikan was on high alert with a tsunami warning!
In the middle of this adversity the community rose up and came together for the donor, his family, and the patients waiting on the other end. The hospital was not about to let a little inclement weather stand in the way of saving lives. The ICU manager at the time, Kendall Sawa, called his friend at the airport, explained the situation and got it re-opened for us. They were able to find someone to volunteer to come in and continuously plow the runway for several hours, as our surgical teams flew in. Kendall also got in touch with the man who owns the ferry company and he agreed to come out and run a ferry from the airport (on a separate island) to the mainland for us in the middle of a tsunami warning.
It was one natural disaster after another, but we were able to make it happen with the help of an entire community.
The funny thing was that not only did we need the support of so many people in the community, but we also need to convince the transplant surgeons to get on a plane and fly thru a blizzard, land on an icy runway at a closed airport, and take a ferry through the water in the middle of a tsunami warning to a small hospital in Ketchikan Alaska– all to make donation possible.
It worked. In the end 4 lives were saved; his heart, liver and both kidneys were transplanted into very lucky recipients. Without the amazing and tireless support of this hospital and the community of Ketchikan none of this would have been possible.
Ketchikan General Hospital
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