Meeting my donor's family

Nevada Donor Network

Becky Mintz always thought of herself as an ordinary healthy wife and mother. That is, until the day she suffered a massive heart attack caused by two separate blood clots. She remembers the fear and worry etched on the faces of her husband and teenaged daughter as she woke up in the hospital to learn a pump implanted in her stomach was all that was keeping her alive. Her life had changed forever.

Becky spent the following few months in and out of the hospital, learning to adapt to life with an LVAD, or Left Ventricular Assist Device. Becky’s doctor explained that her damaged heart would need to be replaced with a healthy one, and she was eventually placed on the National Waiting List for Organ Transplantation. She could have waited months, even years for a heart that may have never come. But as fate would have it, only 11 days would pass before a heart became available for Becky.

Here is Becky’s story about meeting her organ donor’s family, in her own words.

http://www.nvdonor.org/index.php/2012/04/meeting-my-donors-family/