Organ donation bittersweet for families

The speeches were over, the plaques had been presented, and most of the audience had cleared out. Now two families lingered, trying to sort out this bittersweet business of giving and receiving.

"Do you ever have any animosity?" Jill Glennon wanted to know.

"For us, no, none," answered Robb Nelson.

Last summer, Glennon's 9-year-old daughter Kalee received a kidney transplant, a gift from the family of a 19-year-old young woman who had died. The summer before, Nelson and his wife Debbie had donated their 13-year-old daughter KayCee's organs, following a fatal auto accident. One of the kidneys went to a little girl just a few years younger than Kalee Glennon.

The Glennons and the Nelsons met Thursday at a small ceremony at the University of Utah Hospital. The hospital, according to figures recently released by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), has one of the top organ donation consent rates in the country and the highest in the Intermountain West. During 2004, 95 percent of the families approached for organ donation said "yes," compared to a national consent rate of just 50 percent.

The ceremony was a way to thank the nurses, social workers and other staff members who work with families as death approaches for a loved one. For Glennon it was also a chance to talk face-to-face with a family like the one whose loss had been her gain.

Should she write that family a letter to thank them, she wondered. Would it just make them feel sad? She once had looked up the family's number in the phone book, she said, but never made the call, worried that she might catch them on a bad day.

"For us," said Robb Nelson, "it's a joy to hear" how their daughter's organ donations have helped others.

Yes, it's a tragedy that their beautiful daughter died, Debbie Nelson said. "But if I couldn't save KayCee, at least I could take someone else's pain away. The real tragedy would have been if she died and we knew we could help other people and we hadn't done that."

It was the hospital staff's compassion as she faced KayCee's death that helped her let go, she said. Plus she knew that KayCee was moved that her favorite writer, John Bytheway, had been a living kidney donor to his brother.