{"id":20303,"date":"2018-04-04T20:47:45","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T00:47:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=20303"},"modified":"2018-04-04T20:47:45","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T00:47:45","slug":"advocate-accepts-award-in-name-of-anonymous-hero-who-gave-her-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/advocate-accepts-award-in-name-of-anonymous-hero-who-gave-her-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Advocate accepts award in name of anonymous hero who gave her life"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Arlene Lindsay may have taken home the award, but she didn\u2019t accept it just for herself \u2013 she also accepted it on behalf of a man she never got the chance to know but who nevertheless gave her the gift of life.
\nMs. Lindsay, a long-time local advocate for organ donation, received an Advocates in Action Award last week from the Trillium Gift of Life Network, a non-profit agency of the Ontario Government to support organ and tissue donation across the Province.
\n\u201cIt was a great honour and it means our group, the York Region Gift of Life group, has worked really hard and we couldn\u2019t do it without them,\u201d says Ms. Lindsay. \u201cOur group is made up of dedicated volunteer advocates, donor families, people waiting for transplants, living donors, transplant recipients and people who are just really interested in sharing the importance of organ and tissue donor awareness.\u201d
\nMs. Lindsay is a 25-year recipient of a liver donation.
\nWhen she was fresh out of high school, Ms. Lindsay was thrilled to get out into the world and start the job she had secured for herself the Monday after graduation.
\n\u201cI wanted to get this new adventure started, but I never did get there,\u201d she says. \u201cA few days before my job was about to begin, out of nowhere, the whites of my eyes were yellow, I had no energy, I was so weak, I couldn\u2019t even lift my head off the pillow. Even my urine was extremely bright and those are all signs of something not right inside.\u201d
\nShe was hospitalized for several weeks for what was thought to be hepatitis and a hospital stay was followed by several weeks of bed rest at home.
\nBut life, as it does, continued on \u2013 and in Arlene\u2019s case, it continued on normally for the next 20 years, bar a couple of hospital visits here and there.
\nShe got a job, continued to work, married and had children, but over 30 years her disease \u2013 properly diagnosed as autoimmune hepatitis \u2013 progressed to the point where she needed a new liver.
\n\u201cI was told I had to have a transplant or I was going to die,\u201d she says. \u201cI was freaking out, I had never met a person who has had a transplant and I wasn\u2019t getting any better. I remember writing heartfelt letters of love and wishes for my kids in case I didn\u2019t make it and that was really hard. But it has been 25 years since my liver transplant and, without it, I would never have met my fabulous grandchildren!\u201d
\nAll Ms. Lindsay knows about her donor, the man who made that possible, is that he was in his 40s with three young children, and that he lost his life in a car accident.
\nHe probably didn\u2019t think much when he signed his name to his donor card, but today there is no doubt in Ms. Lindsay\u2019s mind \u2013 \u201cHe is my hero. Every day I am grateful for him.\u201d
\nWith this gratitude in mind, Ms. Lindsay has dedicated herself to the cause.
\n\u201cLife really is precious and we should never take it for granted because this could happen to any man, woman or child,\u201d she explains. \u201cThere are over 1,500 people waiting for a transplant, including men, women and children. Everybody has the power to help make a difference. It is very simple: you take the cell phone in one hand, go to beadonor.ca, and take your health card in the other hand and within two minutes you\u2019re a donor.
\n\u201cSome people think they are too old to register or that their organs aren\u2019t work giving to anybody. That is definitely not true because the oldest organ donor was over 90 years old and the oldest tissue donor was 102! That is amazing. It really works. There are some people who say transplants don\u2019t work, but I am living proof that it does \u2013 and so are the rest of the people who are here today to talk about it.\u201d
\nAnd talk about it she does, along with other members of York Region Gift of Life, who travel not only around York Region, but to various parts of the province through Trillium to share their stories, spread the word, and sign up potential heroes.
\n\u201cJust do it,\u201d she says. \u201cDon\u2019t put it off. Every three days someone dies waiting for an organ transplant. It is very, very important that we just don\u2019t say, yeah, we\u2019ll do it but to actually go in and do it. It takes two minutes to actually do it.
\n\u201cOne organ donor can save up to eight lives and enhance as many as 75 others through tissue donations. That says an awful lot. The most important thing to do is tell your family. It is important to discuss it and talk about it because we\u2019re all going to get there one day. I have a shirt that says, \u2018Please don\u2019t take your organs to heaven. Heaven knows we need them here.\u2019 We recycle everything else, why not parts of ourselves, if it is going to help somebody? You could be a hero!\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arlene Lindsay may have taken home the award, but she didn\u2019t accept it just for herself \u2013 she also accepted it on behalf of a man she never got the chance to know but who nevertheless gave her the gift of life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5ht","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-01 04:49:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/2018-04-05-03.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}