Author tells how sister’s life extended by organ donation
- By ALDEN ALLEN
- Special to The Advocate
She needed a matching donor liver and a transplant to survive, he told some 70 people gathered at the LSU Lod Cook Alumni Center at LSU.
She lived because someone chose organ donation, he said.
Not only did she live, but she managed to do important things with the rest of her life, he said.
In 1990 Jeffery Marx, his sister, Wendy Marx, and Olympic champion Carl Lewis founded the nonprofit Wendy Marx Foundation for Organ Donor Awareness.
Wendy Marx became an active member in the national campaign for organ and tissue donation using her own experiences to communicate her message and increase organ donation awareness, her brother said.
There are an average 109,000 people on the organ transplant waiting list at any given time, Jeffery Marx said.
Because of a shortage of donors, people die every day waiting for a transplant, he said, adding that his sister was determined to change that.
Wendy Marx died in 2003 at the age of 36 when she was diagnosed with Hepatitis B for the second time. But a transplant did not arrive in time to save her life.
“The very same issue we’d been working on for years took Wendy’s life,” Jeffrey Marx said.
“The time has come to redefine what we mean by impossible,” he said. “Impossibility is that which cannot be done — until someone does it.”
As well as being a writer, Jeffrey Marx is the director of Wendy Marx Foundation for Organ Donor Awareness.
To learn more about the Wendy Marx Foundation, please click HERE
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