Yesterday we were invited to share Hannah’s Story at the Versiti Impact Summit in Milwaukee. This meeting focused on helping medical professionals get up to date with the latest climate and advancements in organ donation. We had one session that covered the legal side of organ donation. It was a well-prepared presentation by Christina Strong, a lawyer and advocate for organ donation who was very involved in the process of creating the legislation that allows for organ donation. She was able to not only share about the actual laws themselves, but she was also able to explain the process, reasoning, and intentions behind them. It was certainly a unique and impactful perspective! We had other sessions too that covered a wide variety of topics ranging from donor family support to managing personal stress, as so many medical professionals face things that tear at their hearts for the rest of their lives.
Actually, as we walked into the hall, we were surprised and excited to see my cousin (in-law technically) Niki!!! We were not expecting to really know anyone, but somehow, she found out that we were going to be there, and SHE STILL CAME!??!?!? It was great talking with her, and we even stopped for a picture.
I would guess that there were around 150 participants, and they each represented their own hospitals, clinics, and care facilities. These are the people who work very hard, giving of themselves on a daily basis. In one of our sessions, we answered a series of questions anonymously, then the cards were randomly redistributed. One of the questions asked what the hardest part of working in that high-stress environment was. The answer on the card that I received said, “Letting go when my best simply isn’t good enough.” That really stuck out to me! In this world, we each want to be completely in control, but there are times and situations that we face in life that force us to realize that there are things that happen that are outside of our control. It’s at these times that our faith reminds us that not only are we not ever fully in control, but we are not ever expected to be fully in control either. As a person who has lost a lot and hurts deeply, my faith in God and His ability to work all things together for good helps me to “let go.” Yes, it often takes time to get to that point, and it often involves internal struggle with disappointment, feelings of inadequacy, or guilt, but in the end, I find peace in the fact that doing my best is all that I am really expected to do by God. The last question asked us, “What would help you the most?” This person answered that they wish that the world around them was more accepting and less judging. Although we know that we are all human, we often expect everyone to be perfect, well everyone but ourselves that is. I’m glad that God sees our hearts and only judges from His loving, understanding perspective. He knows our strengths and weaknesses, He understands our humanity, and he “sees us.”
As I mentioned at the beginning, we were there to represent Hannah and donor families. I was able to share Hannah’s Story with everyone for 15 minutes, and if you would like to read that speech, it will be at the end of this post. We were also able to talk personally with many of the people that came. It was a special opportunity to meet so many amazing people! Outside of parenting, I don’t know of any “job” that takes so much constant heart and love from a person. If you are concerned about the state of humanity, turn off the news and social media. Then go down to your local hospital and see real heroes at work!
Thank You Versiti and thanks to everyone who came!
We are blessed
P.S. We can’t do this alone. If you would like to donate to Hannah Helps:
PayPal: paypal.com/us/fundraiser/charity/5609126
Venmo: venmo.com/u/hannahhelps19
Your support is needed and greatly appreciated!
Thank You!
My Versiti Impact Summit Speech
The life of our daughter Hannah was marked by determination, hard work, and a love for people and education. She was active in our church, both in the music program and also in the outreach to the children of Jefferson. Hannah knew all the kids by name, she regularly talked to them about their lives at school, at home, and about their goals for their futures. They all knew that she was someone who deeply cared for them and they loved her a lot. She was also a virtual school student with a life’s dream of going to college, and once she turned sixteen, she began working hard to reach that dream. Hannah would wake up early, drink a cup of hot chocolate as she did her schoolwork for an hour or two, then she would go to work as a waitress or CSM at Hobby Lobby, then she would come back home to complete her assignments, while she drank another cup of hot chocolate. She took dual enrollment classes in her last two years of high school and also during her summer and Christmas breaks. Hannah loved the education, the work, and the personal responsibility. In the fall of 2024, her dream came true as she became an on-campus dorm student for the first time. She majored in Secondary English Education and chose Teaching English as a Second Language as her minor. Because of those prior efforts in school and at work, she started her first year on campus as a second semester sophomore with enough money saved to pay for her full four-year education!
Hannah loved college life, but two years ago next Wednesday, the night after her nineteenth birthday, she swallowed just one bite of a brownie that was given to her by a friend as they met to study in the library. The next day we learned that it contained peanut flour, which made the peanut undetectable, and Hannah was allergic to peanuts. We knew that Hannah had this allergy, but it had never been a big deal. We had only encountered it twice in her life, at ages three and six. Each time these episodes were mild and brief. We took her to an allergist, and there she received her first EpiPens. Over the next thirteen years she became an adult, and we never had any issue with her allergy. In fact, Hannah would say that her body could naturally recognize peanut in food. Especially if it came near her nose or mouth. She couldn’t force herself to eat it even if she wanted to. BUT, that Monday night, after she realized that something was wrong, she ran back to her dorm, threw up, and called us to come and be with her. Hannah didn’t take her epinephrine though because she wasn’t having any difficulty breathing and she felt that over all she was “OK.”
We kept her on the phone as we raced to her side, and her reaction seemed to be over with by the time that we arrived in Watertown forty-five minutes later. But the situation took a drastic turn when she laid down to rest. After climbing into her bed on the top bunk, Hannah rolled onto her side. Then she began to have sudden difficulty breathing, and then she passed out as she was climbing down the ladder. We gave her the EpiPen and called 911! I picked her up like a big limp rag doll and carried her outside to the arriving ambulance. As it was pulling in, I briefly sat her on my knee, facing me. I had one arm behind her back and my other hand at the base of her head, to hold it up. It was the most helpless feeling that a parent could ever have! As I looked at her lifeless face, only inches from mine, I thought, “Is this really happening!? Is Hannah dying in my arms!?” With her pulse getting weak and thready, all I could do was to tell her that we were there, that we loved her, and that it would be “OK.” After I handed her off to the paramedics, they took her quickly into the ambulance, but once inside, her heart stopped for several minutes. They were able to restart it, but her blood oxygen level remained dangerously low. The doctors at the ER couldn’t get it to go up either. They put her on a ventilator, with oxygen, and the pressure was turned up higher than normal. No one could understand how things had gotten that bad so quickly from an allergy. They wanted to get us to a larger hospital, but transport took two hours to arrive. Shortly after midnight an x-ray showed that Hannah’s right lung had collapsed when she laid down to rest. They quickly reinflated it and her oxygen level shot right up to where it needed to be, and then she was transferred to Froedtert.
At six in the morning, we got our first real update on her condition. They were keeping her alive, but there was extensive brain damage! It did not look good, but only time would tell how bad it really was…
That week in the ICU we found an amazing family of doctors and nurses. Our first nurse, who was also named Hannah, rearranged her work schedule and days off so that she could be with us the whole time. Another nurse named Jackie, used her day off to make our ICU room feel more like home. She bought Hannah a blanket, a teddy bear, and Christmas decorations, and then she came back to our room to decorate it with nurse Hannah!
Like most people, we had heard about organ donation, but it was never something that I seriously considered. It’s not really a situation that anyone expects to be in, but on our second day in the hospital, I got a text from my cousin. He was at Froedtert too, but for an appointment of his own, and he asked to meet with me. He was a big, tall, strong guy and someone who I always respected, but as I walked into the cafeteria that afternoon, I saw that things had changed drastically. He was in a wheelchair, on oxygen, and had difficulty standing. He told me about the sudden onset of his lung condition, and that he needed a double-lung transplant to live. His only hope was organ donation! He was there, THAT DAY, to be put on the organ transplant waiting list. As I talked with him and his wife, and then paralleled their family with mine, God helped me see the other side of organ donation. That is, my cousin would literally lose his life, unless someone made that decision to donate! Parents would lose a son, a wife would lose her husband, and children would lose their father. After our conversation, I went back upstairs to Hannah’s room and shared these things with Janean, and we tucked those thoughts away in the back of our minds while we waited and prayed for a miracle.
As we stayed by her side, we longed for her eyes to open, but Hannah never came back to us that week. Then late on Friday night, her heart began to slow way down from the swelling of her brain. More testing needed to be done, and as we waited in the darkness of that hospital room, realizing that we could be near the end of her life, Janean asked, “How are we ever going to survive this?” The immediate response that God put in my mind was, “We need to Do Right: We will Breathe, Take small steps, and Keep moving forward.” Moments later, when we saw the doctor rolling a chair in to talk to us, we already knew what he was going to say… He was holding back tears as he told us the obvious truth of the situation. Hannah was about to die and there was no more hope! It was at that point that we chose organ donation for our daughter.
Two volunteers from Versiti met us in the middle of the night. They made sure that we understood our decision, and we scheduled the donation for Sunday. On Sunday morning nurse Hannah came to me and told me that our Hannah’s heart had become very difficult to manage. She needed me to give them permission to resuscitate so Hannah could make it to the donation time. I thought, “As hard as it is to ‘let her go,’ now I have to ‘hold her back,’ for strangers!?” I did give them permission, knowing that it was the right thing to do, and it was what Hannah would do.
So, on Sunday November 3rd we celebrated Hannah’s nineteenth birthday and one week later on Sunday November 10th, we held her honor walk and said our final goodbyes outside the operating room doors. As we were doing this, we were also thinking about those unknown recipients and their families who were gathered in a hospital just like us. There was no more that could be done to save Hannah, but because of her Gift of Life, those “strangers” as we knew them would soon have a life and a future again! At 3:57 our daughter’s life ended, but the lives of four recipients began again, two more received the gift of sight, and many more have been impacted by her life and our decision to donate!
Living in the ICU and watching the brain damage run its course was devastating, but even as we were going through all that, we felt the love and support of all the doctors and nurses that we had. They laughed with us and they cried with us. They were with us when we first arrived, they kept a watchful eye on us day and night, they were crying with us at the Honor Walk, and some of them stood by Hannah’s side there in the operating room as her life ended. There aren’t words adequate enough to express our appreciation for the doctors and nurses that we had, and there is no job as meaningful, and as important, as the medical profession.
We will always be indebted to our “Froedtert Family,” and they will always hold a very special place in our hearts. They were the “family” that we needed that week, and it was that loving, personal care that allowed us to feel confident that everything had been done to save Hannah’s life. This is the confidence that allowed us to KNOW that we were making the right decision in choosing organ donation, and that, even more importantly, we were making it at the right time.
Throughout that week in the hospital, we were confident that saving Hannah’s life and seeing her fully recover was their goal as much as it was ours. As important as their diplomas and experience were, it was the relationship that they built with us, throughout the entire week, that really allowed us to trust them. And believe me, when you’re holding your daughter’s warm but lifeless hand near the end of her life, trust is extremely important.
Ethically and legally, organ donation too is built on trust, primarily in two key areas. First is the trust that the donor’s life ALWAYS comes first! Even after we made the decision to donate, and all the way up until her heart stopped, we were assured that if there was any indication that Hannah’s life could be saved, the donation process would immediately stop, because, organ donation does not take a life to save a life! Second is the trust that the recipients will get the best organ possible to save their life! Great care goes into testing, matching, and transplanting the Gift of Life. Saving life is the heart of organ donation for both the donor and the recipient.
I have said that Hannah’s situation was like a plane crash. Although we could not stop the plane from crashing, through organ donation, we could influence where it landed. After getting that final update on Friday night, we understood that we needed to choose Faith over Fear, and our faith is what gave us the ability to Do Right. We had faith that everything possible had been done to save her life. We had faith that by making this decision, we were not choosing for our daughter to die, but really, we were just choosing to give up something that we could not keep anyway. We had faith that through our loss, and with the help of Versiti, we could keep other people from going through what we had to endure. And finally, we had faith in God. We certainly did not ask for this to happen, but we do believe that even in this, He is working everything out for a greater good.
The way that we came to choose organ donation was certainly unusual, and we definitely understand that. But we also know that sometimes a patient or a family like ours may just need one suggestion or a gentle nudge in that direction from someone they trust. A simple call to Versiti allows their trained, compassionate team the opportunity to make that visit and to have that conversation. It may not be what they chose, but having that information is very important and it definitely could be the best thing for that family and for up to 8 recipients!
Just a few hours before that tragic bite, Hannah told a friend that she wanted God to use her life in an effective and meaningful way. Through her life and now her passing, He has been doing just that. The beauty of a rainbow can’t come without the rain, and thanks to Versiti and organ donation, we were able to add a beautiful silver lining on to a very dark cloud in our lives.
I certainly can’t say that any of this is easy, but I can definitely say there are four people alive on earth today because of our decision. I can also say that, for us, organ donation, through Versiti, is what made that possible. And finally, I can say that anyone who makes that call to Versiti, on behalf of a patient or their family, they too, have a pivotal role to play in saving lives!
Since Hannah’s donation, we have been able to meet two of our recipients. One woman was living on dialysis while taking care of her husband, as he battled cancer. Because of Hannah’s Gift of Life, he was able to see her life saved, and she was able to be with him, a short time later, as he lost his battle with the cancer. Our other recipient, Abby, was thirty-nine and she didn’t know if she would even have a future. When we were first able to communicate with her through Versiti, her first and only question was, “Did Hannah like hot chocolate?” We told her “yes” and we explained her study habits. Abby said, “I thought so. When I woke up from the donation, hot chocolate was the first thing that I NEEDED.” She then explained that she had come here from the Philippines as a young girl and, although she had hot chocolate before, it was not something that she cared for. She loved coffee. But since she received Hannah’s pancreas and a kidney, she had been drinking hot chocolate every day and she knew that she hadn’t just received the Gift of Life, but that she had received a special part of who Hannah was too.
Thank You
