Paso Robles High students encouraged to become donors

Paso Robles Press

Paso Robles High School students this week heard that registering as organ and tissue donors saves lives.

But for one woman, some students learned, help didn’t come soon enough.

Anatomy and physiology teacher Jon-Paul Ewing and his students spent all week registering students as organ and tissue donors. Each new donor can save eight lives with transplantable organs or improve the lives of more than 50 people with donated tissues.

Katie Noel Parsons May didn’t have that chance.

“She needed lungs, but didn’t get them,” an at-times emotional John May told students.

Katie and John were married eight months. Then, on July 16, 2011, she died at UCLA Medical Center, still hoping for a lifesaving double lung transplant.

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