Heart transplant donors save two lives
Apr. 16—Tim Synor lives in Pendleton with his family. His life is peaceful and he feels blessed, he said, but things could've gone a lot differently.
"About 20 years ago I was very, very sick," he said during an event last week at the North Tonawanda DMV. "I was diagnosed with heart failure from a virus."
For eight years, Synor lived with the conditions, and then in 2013, he was admitted into Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester.
Synor described the experience later as being "very bad." He was housed amongst "the sickest of the sick" and saw his family intermittently.
"It was awful," he said in a brief phone call to the US&J. "They'd come and then they'd leave. I was on the seventh floor and I used to go down the hall (to) ... this one window and you could see the garage. I waited for them to leave in the car and I always told them to look up. I'd wave and I was just crying, thinking, it would be the last time I would see them."
Synor stayed there for five months and in July of 2013, an organ donor was found. He never met the family of the 19-year-old whose heart has been inside him for the past 10 years.
Paulette Welker, of the Town of Tonawanda was also housed at Strong and said she and Synor became "real good friends."
Unlike Synor, Welker has met the family of the girl whose heart was donated to her. She said her name was Josephine and she was 19 years old.
Josephine was in a fatal car accident while coming home from a soccer tournament her friends were playing in, Welker said, and was on life support for three days before she was pronounced brain dead.
Initially, her parents said, "no" to donations, but one of her sisters remembered Josephine saying that she wanted to be a donor and the parents gave permission.
"I met the whole family," Welker said. "All the girls and her grandparents (as well)."
Both of them were at the DMV encouraging people to become donors. Currently, you have to sign up to be an organ donor or after death, any useful tissue or organ is discarded in New York state.
"There are more than 10,000 women, men and children in New York state waiting for lifesaving organ transplants and every 10 minutes, another person is added to the national transplant waiting list," Niagara County Clerk Joseph A. Jastrzemski, who organized the event, said. "The fact is that one organ, eye and tissue donor can save eight lives and enhance 75 more. Tim and Paulette are with us today because people cared enough to become donors."
Synor and Welker said they were thankful for their donors and encouraged others to follow suit.
"It's good to be here, I'm trying to get people to sign up," Synor said. "New York state is one of the last states in the U.S. sign-ups because it's an opt-in program. A lot of them you're registered automatically and you have to opt out."
