When she was 16, Jessica Melore ’03 suffered a massive heart attack. Her doctors thought she might not live through the night, and last rites were delivered. She did survive, but she needed a new heart and waited nine long months for a donation. An implanted battery-operated device kept her alive in the meantime.
Though she received a new heart — from an 18-year-old girl who died in a car accident — Melore realized what a shortage of organs there was.
“I remember seeing all the people in the hospital who were waiting months upon months and sometimes not receiving an organ in time, or by the time they received an organ, dying from complications because they had waited so long,” says Melore.
Melore has made a career of raising awareness of the need for organ donors through her work at the New Jersey Organ and Tissue Sharing Network (known as the NJ Sharing Network) and the national organization Donate Life America. After she joined the New Jersey nonprofit in 2004, she worked for three years on a grant to study and develop ways to promote organ donation in the workplace. Then she became the organization’s senior education and programs manager.
Read more: http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2012/04/25/pages/9265/index.xml
{Register to be an organ,eye and tissue donor. To learn how, www.donatelife.net or www.organdonor.gov}
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