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Hello, My
name is Bill Probstfield. I am here today using someone
else’s lungs to breathe.
It is because of a donor and his family’s gift of life
to me. I struggled
to breathe for fifteen years with COPD emphysema. Those
with lung disease learn that nothing else matters when
one cannot breathe because our quality of any life is
based on the quality of our next breath.
Two years ago
at Oregon Health Science University my Pulmonologist told me with my diseased lungs
I had about a year left to live. He offered that I might
consider the only treatment option left: a lung
transplant. I was using full time oxygen and still
needed to rest every twenty feet of walking. I asked the
doctor if I could make it without a lung transplant, he
replied “no, the next cold or flu and certainly
pneumonia that you get could be fatal for you”.
Although my
wife and I were hesitant and not hopeful we chose to try
to get new lungs. I was evaluated, determined to be a
transplant candidate and placed on the waiting list. We
relocated to Seattle near the University of Washington Medical Center and waited for new
lungs. 91 days later, January last year, just two
months before my year ran out and before my 65th
birthday I was transplanted with two new lungs and truly
given the gift of life.
People ask me
“what can you do now that you couldn’t do before your
double lung transplant?” My answer is “Everything”.
I would not
be alive today if some donor and his family did not
think of people like me in their time of tragedy and
give the only gift that would save my life.
In the United
States over 4000 people are waiting for donor lungs to
be transplanted to give them the gift of life. Only 2000
donor lungs are procured each year. Nearly as many
people that perished at the Twin Towers in New York
disaster on Sept. 11, 01 die each year because there are
not enough donor lungs to save them.
I am
grateful and promised if I got new lungs and survived
the surgery that I would help others get lungs. I am
proud to be working with the Oregon Donor Program. There
is no better gift than life: No better way
to memorialize ones mortality than to give this organ or
tissue gift of life to others. No other
opportunity to make this much difference in someone’s
life, their family, community, and perhaps the world.
Available donor organs are needlessly lost every day,
just because the donor and family were not asked or
aware of this opportunity.
Help me help
others by getting the word out so more organs will be
available to those waiting to die without them. It is
our best opportunity to save lives, perhaps the only
chance we will ever have. I plan to donate my
transplanted lungs when I no longer need them.
I like a
bumper sticker I saw, it reads: “Don’t send your
organs to Heaven when Heaven knows they are needed
here.”
Won’t you
join me
in truly making a difference by saving a life? Please
fill out
a donor card today
and
tell your family about your organ donor decision!
Thank You!
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