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Mallory Olsheski kissed her son goodnight and made the five-minute trip from the cardiac critical care unit at Toronto’s Sick Children’s Hospital to Ronald McDonald House, where she and her family were staying while seven-month-old Riley fought for his life.
Exhausted, she was already asleep when the phone rang a short time later. When she saw her son’s cardiologist’s name on the display, the fear hit her anew.
“My heart sank. I thought we had lost him.”
But that phone call on March 4, 2012, did not bring the news Olsheski had dreaded. Instead, she heard the words her family had been praying for: There was a new heart for Riley.
The call would also, eventually, bring the Petawawa family something else — a whole new extended family, joined to them across an international border by one beating heart.
At the time, though, Olsheski and her husband, Adam, knew nothing of the tragedy 600 kilometres away that had been unfolding amid a record snowstorm in rural northern Michigan and which would bring their son the gift of life. That would come later.
For that evening and into the next day as he underwent surgery, they were simply focused on Riley’s second chance at life.
From the day Riley Olsheski was born at The Ottawa Hospital’s General campus, five weeks early on Sept. 23, 2011, his heart was in trouble. He had aortic stenosis, a condition that steadily worsened. By December, the three-month-old baby weighed just eight pounds and had virtually stopped eating. He was rushed to Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto, where an MRI confirmed he was in severe heart failure.
The family — Mallory, Adam, their three older children Christopher 12, Bailey, 7, Hayden, 3, and Mallory’s brother, Brady, who looked after the kids — moved into Ronald McDonald House at Sick Kids to be close to Riley, whose condition was stabilized by emergency surgery, but was not improving. By the end of February, doctors concluded they had done all they could and they prepared to put him on a list as a candidate for a heart transplant.
On March 1, the family received a phone call in the middle of the night. Riley was having a “terrible night” and they should come over. Mallory put on her coat and ran. Adam joined her soon afterward.
Riley was heavily sedated and on muscle relaxers. He lay in bed with a blank stare, seldom smiling or babbling. Heart and respiratory monitors beeped. He was hooked to an intravenous pole that fed pain killers, muscle relaxers and nutrition into his body.
His heart was so weak that his parents could only talk to him and touch him minimally for fear of increasing his blood pressure and stressing him. He made it through the night, but doctors had started discussing putting him on a Berlin Heart, an artificial heart that would keep him going until a donor heart could be found.
Three days later when the phone rang again, Olsheski was prepared for the worst. When good news came instead — after months of watching her son’s condition deteriorate — it overwhelmed her. “I started to cry,” she said. “The tears started to come.”
On March 5, while Riley was undergoing eight hours of surgery, a day his parents consider the start of his new life, a family in Grand Travers, Mich. was coming to grips with devastating news. They were grieving the loss of a little girl who had won their hearts and become part of their family when she was 10 months old. “It was love at first sight, and in my heart I knew she was my daughter,” said her father, Russ Sovis, of the first time he met Moriah.
Moriah Sovis, according to her parents, Kari and Russ, was “the picture of tenacity.”
When she moved in with the family as a foster child, the baby, who had epilepsy, low muscle tone and a lack of muscle control, did not sit up, laugh, roll over or make any noise. Within a year, the toddler could climb, dance and play, despite her physical limitations, and say “Mom,” “Dad” and “Dora.” The family, which includes two older daughters, Myranda and McAra, began the paperwork to adopt Moriah.
“We didn’t see Moriah as ‘special needs,’ we saw her only as our daughter,” said Kari. “We celebrated each one of Moriah’s accomplishments for the struggle it took.”
But Moriah continued to be a very sick little girl with hundreds of seizures some days and a feeding tube to keep her weight from dropping.
On March 2, 2012, a major snowstorm descended on the area around Grand Travers, in Michigan’s upper peninsula. Kari, an emergency room nurse, was working the overnight shift and Russ was home with the three children.
He woke up before dawn the next morning to a cold and dark house. The video monitor the family used to keep an eye on then two-year-old Moriah was dark, so, before heading out to shovel, he grabbed a flashlight and went to check on her.
The minute he got into her room, Russ said, he knew she was gone. “I shined the dull flashlight on her and she didn’t look good at all. I picked up her limp little body and started CPR as I ran to the living room to call 911.”
Doing CPR on Moriah, he said, “was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life.”
A snowplow had to make a special trip down their road so paramedics could get through the snow. They rushed Moriah to the hospital where her mother was working, but it was already too late to save her life.
Doctors concluded Moriah died of respiratory and cardiac failure. She was almost three years old. “She just went to bed and ended up in heaven,” said Kari.
After Moriah Sovis died, her family knew they wanted to donate their daughter’s organs.
The family knew right away they wanted to donate her organs, but that required special permission because the adoption process was not yet finalized.
There were hours of waiting at the hospital that weekend, time, said Kari, that allowed her to come to terms with Moriah’s death and lie beside her to hold her one last time. Moriah, who was declared brain dead, was hooked up to life support so that her organs could be donated.
On March 4, permission had been granted to donate her organs. A Michigan man received the kidneys. And the family learned a recipient had been found for Moriah’s heart, a baby boy in Toronto.
While the Olsheskis were getting the news in Toronto that a heart was being flown in that was a match for their son, Kari and Russ Sovis knew they had one more job to do.
When Moriah died, they were just weeks away from finishing the paperwork that would have completed her adoption.
“We didn’t want her to die as a ward of the court. We wanted her to die our daughter,” said Kari.
The couple approached a judge with the request. He told them: “In my career, I have never done anything just because I am a judge and I can, but this is the right thing to do.”
He backdated Moriah’s adoption papers to March 2, the day before her death.
After her death, the Sovis family officially adopted their foster child Moriah, with special dispensation from a judge.
Within days of the heart transplant, meanwhile, Riley was acting like a different boy. His colour was immediately better, said his mother, Mallory. “It was an amazing transformation. Only about five days after the surgery, he laughed and smiled at us. Once he was home, the giggling never stopped.”
The family returned to Petawawa on April 25. Riley had only been home briefly since birth. For him, it was the start of a new life.
Riley was lucky. Only two to three per cent of deaths happen in such a way that organ donation is even possible. The donor must die in hospital and be on a ventilator. The donor, or donor’s parents must have given consent. And donations for children are even rarer. Between 2009 and 2013 there were 31 children under the age of one who received a transplant in Ontario. Nine of those were heart transplants, according to Ontario’s Trillium Gift of Life Network.
Her son was getting stronger and more rambunctious every day, but Mallory was still unsettled about something. She had been trying to write a thank-you note to the anonymous donor family, but found it impossible to do. As she asked in a blog post after the transplant: “How do you thank someone who saves you when all hope is lost? All you need to do is send them a thank you . . . and it is the hardest thank you note you have ever written.”
Under Ontario law, organ donations are anonymous, although recipients and donors are able to communicate by letter with identifying details excluded, if they wish.
Trillium, the organization that oversees organ donations in this province, says the anonymity is necessary because everyone approaches grief and recovery differently.
“Organ donation is an emotional process and the feelings of both donor families and recipients are hard to predict,” said a spokesperson. “There may be reluctance on behalf of one side to be in contact, or feelings may change over time.”
Mallory and Adam had received letters from the Sovis family, with identifying details removed. “You now have in your family a part of our family,” one of the letters read. But Mallory struggled to reply.
In fact, it took her a while to even read the letters. “I had been through so much, I just wanted to be happy. I didn’t want to feel like I was enjoying the fact that another family had been through so much torment. . . . It was such a struggle for me. I was so happy, but it almost seemed like it was at the expense of someone else.”
And yet, she said, she longed to tell them how their gift had changed her family and to express her thanks, but she didn’t know how to approach it.
“I desperately wanted the family to know what angels they are. How they single-handedly saved my son’s life,” she said.
As Riley improved and the family settled into more normalcy, Mallory said she thought more about the donor family. Then her mother admitted she had done some sleuthing on the Internet and was pretty sure she knew who the donor’s family was. “Do you want to know who they are?” she asked Mallory, who said yes.
The Sovis family, meanwhile, worried that the little boy who received Moriah’s heart had not survived the transplant because they hadn’t heard anything. That left a question in their lives that was making it difficult to move on.
“Not a day didn’t go by that I didn’t think about her heart,” said Russ. “For some reason, I had to know.”
In Michigan, laws around organ donations are different than in Ontario, and they were able to meet the man who received Moriah’s kidneys, even held a party to thank the paramedics, nurses and doctors who tried to save her and invited the recipient, who has since become close to their family. But they continued to wonder about the heart recipient.
Then in June, Father’s Day weekend, Russ got a friend request on Facebook from a young woman he didn’t recognize.
“How do I know you?” he asked.
“You don’t,” replied Mallory, “but let me tell you who I am.”
When Russ got the news that Riley was thriving, he ran through the house yelling, “He’s alive, he’s alive!”
Mallory Olsheski says reaching out to the family who gave her son Riley his new heart was overwhelming at first.
Mallory Olsheski’s son Riley started his new life, his family says, after his heart transplant.
The Sovis family calls it closure, knowing that Riley is doing well and that something good has come from Moriah’s death.
“It has helped with the grieving process,” said Russ. “Just to know he is OK and Moriah’s heart beats is so amazing. I struggled with flashbacks of seeing Moriah in her crib and the CPR. Seeing Riley helps, knowing that it was for God’s glory.”
At a distance, the two families have been getting to know each other, through Facebook, sharing photos and conversations. The children have written letters back and forth and the families exchanged boxes of presents sent through the mail between Grand Travers and Petawawa.
And Mallory has had a chance to begin to thank the family whose decision saved her son’s life.
In August, on what would have been Moriah’s fifth birthday, she put together a video montage of members of her family, friends and extended family holding candles for Moriah to the song There’s a Hero. Riley was pictured blowing out a candle.
“We are forever grateful to you, Moriah. Today we have come together from all over Ontario to light a candle for the precious gift that is you.”
Kari called that gesture incredible. “Your biggest fear as a parent who has lost a child is you are the only one who remembers them. For her to do that was really amazing.”
The families have not yet met in person. That will come next summer, when the Sovis family plans to travel to Petawawa. It will be a kind of family reunion.
“I consider them a part of my family,” said Mallory. “They gave my son his life. Without them, I am not sure where we would be.”
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epayne@ottawacitizen.com
To donate: www.BeADonor.ca
查看原文...
Exhausted, she was already asleep when the phone rang a short time later. When she saw her son’s cardiologist’s name on the display, the fear hit her anew.
“My heart sank. I thought we had lost him.”
But that phone call on March 4, 2012, did not bring the news Olsheski had dreaded. Instead, she heard the words her family had been praying for: There was a new heart for Riley.
The call would also, eventually, bring the Petawawa family something else — a whole new extended family, joined to them across an international border by one beating heart.
At the time, though, Olsheski and her husband, Adam, knew nothing of the tragedy 600 kilometres away that had been unfolding amid a record snowstorm in rural northern Michigan and which would bring their son the gift of life. That would come later.
For that evening and into the next day as he underwent surgery, they were simply focused on Riley’s second chance at life.
From the day Riley Olsheski was born at The Ottawa Hospital’s General campus, five weeks early on Sept. 23, 2011, his heart was in trouble. He had aortic stenosis, a condition that steadily worsened. By December, the three-month-old baby weighed just eight pounds and had virtually stopped eating. He was rushed to Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto, where an MRI confirmed he was in severe heart failure.
The family — Mallory, Adam, their three older children Christopher 12, Bailey, 7, Hayden, 3, and Mallory’s brother, Brady, who looked after the kids — moved into Ronald McDonald House at Sick Kids to be close to Riley, whose condition was stabilized by emergency surgery, but was not improving. By the end of February, doctors concluded they had done all they could and they prepared to put him on a list as a candidate for a heart transplant.
On March 1, the family received a phone call in the middle of the night. Riley was having a “terrible night” and they should come over. Mallory put on her coat and ran. Adam joined her soon afterward.
Riley was heavily sedated and on muscle relaxers. He lay in bed with a blank stare, seldom smiling or babbling. Heart and respiratory monitors beeped. He was hooked to an intravenous pole that fed pain killers, muscle relaxers and nutrition into his body.
His heart was so weak that his parents could only talk to him and touch him minimally for fear of increasing his blood pressure and stressing him. He made it through the night, but doctors had started discussing putting him on a Berlin Heart, an artificial heart that would keep him going until a donor heart could be found.
Three days later when the phone rang again, Olsheski was prepared for the worst. When good news came instead — after months of watching her son’s condition deteriorate — it overwhelmed her. “I started to cry,” she said. “The tears started to come.”
On March 5, while Riley was undergoing eight hours of surgery, a day his parents consider the start of his new life, a family in Grand Travers, Mich. was coming to grips with devastating news. They were grieving the loss of a little girl who had won their hearts and become part of their family when she was 10 months old. “It was love at first sight, and in my heart I knew she was my daughter,” said her father, Russ Sovis, of the first time he met Moriah.
Moriah Sovis, according to her parents, Kari and Russ, was “the picture of tenacity.”
When she moved in with the family as a foster child, the baby, who had epilepsy, low muscle tone and a lack of muscle control, did not sit up, laugh, roll over or make any noise. Within a year, the toddler could climb, dance and play, despite her physical limitations, and say “Mom,” “Dad” and “Dora.” The family, which includes two older daughters, Myranda and McAra, began the paperwork to adopt Moriah.
“We didn’t see Moriah as ‘special needs,’ we saw her only as our daughter,” said Kari. “We celebrated each one of Moriah’s accomplishments for the struggle it took.”
But Moriah continued to be a very sick little girl with hundreds of seizures some days and a feeding tube to keep her weight from dropping.
On March 2, 2012, a major snowstorm descended on the area around Grand Travers, in Michigan’s upper peninsula. Kari, an emergency room nurse, was working the overnight shift and Russ was home with the three children.
He woke up before dawn the next morning to a cold and dark house. The video monitor the family used to keep an eye on then two-year-old Moriah was dark, so, before heading out to shovel, he grabbed a flashlight and went to check on her.
The minute he got into her room, Russ said, he knew she was gone. “I shined the dull flashlight on her and she didn’t look good at all. I picked up her limp little body and started CPR as I ran to the living room to call 911.”
Doing CPR on Moriah, he said, “was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life.”
A snowplow had to make a special trip down their road so paramedics could get through the snow. They rushed Moriah to the hospital where her mother was working, but it was already too late to save her life.
Doctors concluded Moriah died of respiratory and cardiac failure. She was almost three years old. “She just went to bed and ended up in heaven,” said Kari.
After Moriah Sovis died, her family knew they wanted to donate their daughter’s organs.
The family knew right away they wanted to donate her organs, but that required special permission because the adoption process was not yet finalized.
There were hours of waiting at the hospital that weekend, time, said Kari, that allowed her to come to terms with Moriah’s death and lie beside her to hold her one last time. Moriah, who was declared brain dead, was hooked up to life support so that her organs could be donated.
On March 4, permission had been granted to donate her organs. A Michigan man received the kidneys. And the family learned a recipient had been found for Moriah’s heart, a baby boy in Toronto.
While the Olsheskis were getting the news in Toronto that a heart was being flown in that was a match for their son, Kari and Russ Sovis knew they had one more job to do.
When Moriah died, they were just weeks away from finishing the paperwork that would have completed her adoption.
“We didn’t want her to die as a ward of the court. We wanted her to die our daughter,” said Kari.
The couple approached a judge with the request. He told them: “In my career, I have never done anything just because I am a judge and I can, but this is the right thing to do.”
He backdated Moriah’s adoption papers to March 2, the day before her death.
After her death, the Sovis family officially adopted their foster child Moriah, with special dispensation from a judge.
Within days of the heart transplant, meanwhile, Riley was acting like a different boy. His colour was immediately better, said his mother, Mallory. “It was an amazing transformation. Only about five days after the surgery, he laughed and smiled at us. Once he was home, the giggling never stopped.”
The family returned to Petawawa on April 25. Riley had only been home briefly since birth. For him, it was the start of a new life.
Riley was lucky. Only two to three per cent of deaths happen in such a way that organ donation is even possible. The donor must die in hospital and be on a ventilator. The donor, or donor’s parents must have given consent. And donations for children are even rarer. Between 2009 and 2013 there were 31 children under the age of one who received a transplant in Ontario. Nine of those were heart transplants, according to Ontario’s Trillium Gift of Life Network.
Her son was getting stronger and more rambunctious every day, but Mallory was still unsettled about something. She had been trying to write a thank-you note to the anonymous donor family, but found it impossible to do. As she asked in a blog post after the transplant: “How do you thank someone who saves you when all hope is lost? All you need to do is send them a thank you . . . and it is the hardest thank you note you have ever written.”
Under Ontario law, organ donations are anonymous, although recipients and donors are able to communicate by letter with identifying details excluded, if they wish.
Trillium, the organization that oversees organ donations in this province, says the anonymity is necessary because everyone approaches grief and recovery differently.
“Organ donation is an emotional process and the feelings of both donor families and recipients are hard to predict,” said a spokesperson. “There may be reluctance on behalf of one side to be in contact, or feelings may change over time.”
Mallory and Adam had received letters from the Sovis family, with identifying details removed. “You now have in your family a part of our family,” one of the letters read. But Mallory struggled to reply.
In fact, it took her a while to even read the letters. “I had been through so much, I just wanted to be happy. I didn’t want to feel like I was enjoying the fact that another family had been through so much torment. . . . It was such a struggle for me. I was so happy, but it almost seemed like it was at the expense of someone else.”
And yet, she said, she longed to tell them how their gift had changed her family and to express her thanks, but she didn’t know how to approach it.
“I desperately wanted the family to know what angels they are. How they single-handedly saved my son’s life,” she said.
As Riley improved and the family settled into more normalcy, Mallory said she thought more about the donor family. Then her mother admitted she had done some sleuthing on the Internet and was pretty sure she knew who the donor’s family was. “Do you want to know who they are?” she asked Mallory, who said yes.
The Sovis family, meanwhile, worried that the little boy who received Moriah’s heart had not survived the transplant because they hadn’t heard anything. That left a question in their lives that was making it difficult to move on.
“Not a day didn’t go by that I didn’t think about her heart,” said Russ. “For some reason, I had to know.”
In Michigan, laws around organ donations are different than in Ontario, and they were able to meet the man who received Moriah’s kidneys, even held a party to thank the paramedics, nurses and doctors who tried to save her and invited the recipient, who has since become close to their family. But they continued to wonder about the heart recipient.
Then in June, Father’s Day weekend, Russ got a friend request on Facebook from a young woman he didn’t recognize.
“How do I know you?” he asked.
“You don’t,” replied Mallory, “but let me tell you who I am.”
When Russ got the news that Riley was thriving, he ran through the house yelling, “He’s alive, he’s alive!”
Mallory Olsheski says reaching out to the family who gave her son Riley his new heart was overwhelming at first.
Mallory Olsheski’s son Riley started his new life, his family says, after his heart transplant.
The Sovis family calls it closure, knowing that Riley is doing well and that something good has come from Moriah’s death.
“It has helped with the grieving process,” said Russ. “Just to know he is OK and Moriah’s heart beats is so amazing. I struggled with flashbacks of seeing Moriah in her crib and the CPR. Seeing Riley helps, knowing that it was for God’s glory.”
At a distance, the two families have been getting to know each other, through Facebook, sharing photos and conversations. The children have written letters back and forth and the families exchanged boxes of presents sent through the mail between Grand Travers and Petawawa.
And Mallory has had a chance to begin to thank the family whose decision saved her son’s life.
In August, on what would have been Moriah’s fifth birthday, she put together a video montage of members of her family, friends and extended family holding candles for Moriah to the song There’s a Hero. Riley was pictured blowing out a candle.
“We are forever grateful to you, Moriah. Today we have come together from all over Ontario to light a candle for the precious gift that is you.”
Kari called that gesture incredible. “Your biggest fear as a parent who has lost a child is you are the only one who remembers them. For her to do that was really amazing.”
The families have not yet met in person. That will come next summer, when the Sovis family plans to travel to Petawawa. It will be a kind of family reunion.
“I consider them a part of my family,” said Mallory. “They gave my son his life. Without them, I am not sure where we would be.”
Related
epayne@ottawacitizen.com
To donate: www.BeADonor.ca
查看原文...
