Say a prayer for Jacob tonight... [View All]

I worked what turned out to be a fatal motorcycle accident last night; a 17 year-old kid with too much motorcycle and too little judgment ran a stop sign and t-boned a car at about 45 m.p.h. . He was thrown approximately 115 feet into a field. He wasn't wearing a helmet.

When I got there, he was still alive, and you wouldn't have thought much was wrong with him except for some bad road rash and a few minor cuts--- not until you noticed the blood and cerebrospinal fluid running out of his ears and his mouth. A good-looking kid--- tall, blond, blue-eyed, athletic build--- a kid any parent would be proud to flip open their wallet and point to a photo and say 'that's our son, Jacob'. *sigh*

He made it to our local hospital E.R., and they were able to stabilize him somewhat, but an MRI revealed that he had suffered a massive brain trauma, the kind you don't survive--- not ever. They did an EEG, and then they did another, and yet another this morning, and they all showed the same thing: this beautiful child, the son, brother, nephew, grandson, cousin, neighbor, friend and teammate everyone knew was no more, because that which made him who he was had departed, though his body had not yet quit.

His poor, shattered, grieving family was approached by whoever's job it is at the hospital to ask, and they were asked to donate his organs, so that out of this senseless tragedy some good might yet be salvaged; they agreed, and at 2:00 p.m. today, that beautiful child was pronounced dead, and his organs harvested for transplant into some of the 83,000 critically-ill people in this state who wait for this 'gift of life', this incredibly precious gift. Because of their generosity, someone whose heart is so weak today that a few steps from bed to chair is exhausting may, in a few months, be able to run, swim or ride a bike; someone else who cannot today see the words I type may be able to look into the face of a spouse or child they have never seen, and someone else who spends hours and hours tethered to a machine to rid their body of the poisons and wastes that accumulate in it may feel truly healthy for the first time in a decade. A fireman critically-burned on the job may survive his injuries because of the skin grafts that came from here. All these things are now possible, because someone cared enough to ask, and someone else had a generosity of spirit that allowed them to say 'yes', even when their hearts were breaking.

Say a prayer for Jacob and his family tonight, and if you haven't signed an organ-donor card and talked to your family about it, tonight might be a good time to do that.

:grouphug: