The York Daily Record | Mile Argento
It's hard enough landing a job in this economy even if you aren't one year removed from having doctors split open your chest and install a new heart, which is what Tony O'Connor went through last year.
Actually, the doctors had to open up his chest three times -- it happens -- when he received a new heart last March. Complications happen because, well, it's a complex procedure, a heart transplant. There were other things -- an allergic reaction to a drug that caused him to go into anaphylactic shock, near blindness caused by another drug, accelerated hair growth caused by yet another medication. That last one isn't so bad. "I have more hair than I ever had," O'Connor said. "It's like Rogaine."
But these days, he's feeling pretty good. He walks every day with his two golden retrievers, Tommy and Munster. He does volunteer work at his church. He gives talks at schools and just about any place that will have him to encourage people to be organ donors.
That last thing can be kind of frustrating. He was recently at an RV show in Hershey, talking about organ donation, and was surprised when people expressed fear, believing that doctors would either harvest their organs before they were dead or would let them die just to get at them.
There are a lot of misconceptions. And O'Connor wants to dispel them. If it weren't for someone signing on as an organ donor, he wouldn't be here.
No comments:
Post a Comment