There are plenty of lessons we can take from last September. One of them is that tomorrow isn’t a guarantee.

Each day, 3,000 North Texans awake to this fact: They’re awaiting organ transplants. And while they’re waiting, 16 people die nationally every day, according to averages compiled by the Dallas-based Southwest Transplant Alliance.

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This month, we’re telling the stories of three neighborhood families impacted by organ transplants.

While their stories aren’t a direct result of 9/11, the impact is similar: Every day for these families is a gift.

These neighbors have life today because of someone else’s death, and the organs they received are proof that at our most powerless, we may be our most powerful.

***

Neighborhood resident Miguel Marrero was a health nut and an athlete. He ran, biked and swam regularly. He was, he says, “a triathlete before triathlons were the big thing.” He’d also been on a vegan diet for more than a decade.

So imagine his surprise when, in 1997, during a  mind/body/health program at Richland College, where he teaches Latin American literature and is director of the honors program, Marrero learned that a blood test had revealed elevated liver functions.

He made an appointment with is primary doctor, who confirmed those results, ruled out hepatitis and recommended he see a cardiologist

Marrero ’s surprise soon turned to shock when, after a litany of tests, doctors told him that his heart was functioning at only 13 percent of what it should be.

“I was in such shock,” he says now. “At first I thought it was a joke, because right before I went there, I had just finished running about 5 miles. My initial reaction was how could that be?”

Marrero’s troubles were traced back to his birth. At six months old, his parents were told he had a heart murmur and, unlike most murmurs, his didn’t disappear as he grew older. Still, he says, “it never slowed me down.”

Now it brought his world to an almost screeching halt. He soon was exhibiting signs of congestive heart failure, which began to wreak havoc on his body. Organs that don’t receive enough blood from the heart begin to store fluid. Marrero was prescribed diuretics to dispel the fluids from his body, but then his potassium levels would crash and he’d experience severe cramping. He was told almost immediately that he would eventually need a new heart.

Nearing the summer of 1998, Marrero says he began “feeling like I was deteriorating more and more.” And, in June of 1998 he was put on the transplant list. In the fall, he could not return to teaching and went on disability.

“From the time they put me on the list, I waited 16 months,” he says. “The last two and one-half months, I waited in hospital. That was probably the most significant period in terms of deterioration.”

At that point, Marrero was having trouble holding food down and, when he did, he says, it caused him to lose consciousness, often three or four times a day. He was also experiencing severe heart arrhythmia, which was causing his heart to skip beats and then speed up to try and make up for it. His condition got so bad that he was moved to ICU. It was October 13, 1999.

“The last thing I do remember is the nurse saying, not to me but I overheard her, that I’d be lucky to make it through the night,” he says. “I went to sleep that night knowing that there was a chance I probably wouldn’t wake up. It seems like such a dream now.”

But, of course, Marrero did live to see another day, and opened his eyes to the sound of a doctor banging on his door and telling him “hurry up, you have a heart waiting for you.”

“That woke me up,” he says with a laugh. “No black coffee can do that for anybody.”

He was quickly prepped for surgery and, to hear him describe it, the scene was something straight out of ER. The last thing he remembers is being run down the hospital hallway on his gurney and looking up at his anesthesiologist running beside him.

“Then I went under,” he says.

Marrero’s transplant was a success and, within five days, he was walking – in increments – the equivalent of one mile around the hospital hallways. On his sixth day, he went home. His mom came to stay with him, he went through two months of physical therapy to regain strength in his atrophied muscles and had to wear a mask for six months to keep contaminated air out of his weakened body.

He says a turning point was feeling his own pulse beating within his fingertips, a sensation that people with healthy hearts grow used to and overlook.

“It had been so long since I felt that. It was such an amazing feeling,” he says. “It’s a beautiful thing when the heart starts to cooperate with the body.”

Today, Marrero lives with his partner, Craig Novarro, and is exercising regularly again. He swims four times a week, bikes a few days and week and runs every morning with his Great Dane, Zula. He’s in better shape than he was before the transplant, he says, and for that opportunity, and all the rest, he’s beyond grateful.

“It sounds repetitive coming from me, but I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the [donor] family’s generosity,” says Marrero, who has returned to teaching and studying for his Ph.D. at UTD and still finds time to educate people about organ donation.

Though he hasn’t met his donor family, he’s written them a letter and is hoping for a response so he can thank them in person.

“To give someone a second chance is such a beautiful, beautiful thing.”

***

Sixty-seven year old Patricia Lodewick’s second chance came ten years ago after a sudden and terrifying illness.

She was nearing the end of a trip to Turkey when she started feeling “kind of draggy.” Over the next few weeks, she began experiencing high fevers, lethargy and nausea. An internist told her she’d contracted a bacterial bug overseas and prescribed sulfur drugs. When her symptoms worsened, he told her it was an allergic reaction to the medication.

On July 18, a few weeks after her return, Lodewick knew something was seriously wrong. Her symptoms were growing worse and her skin had turned alarmingly yellow.

“I thought: I’ve got to go to the emergency room. I think I’m dying,” says neighborhood resident Lodewick, 67.

She was right. Doctors told her that she had a serious liver disease caused by an unidentified virus and, four days after her arrival in the ER, she was placed on a transplant list. Lodewick stayed in the hospital the entire time leading up to her transplant, which came a relatively scant 15 days after her name was put on the list.

“I was one of the very, very lucky ones,” she says.

Her recovery, however, wasn’t marked by such good fortune. The day after her transplant, her spleen ruptured and she endured a second operation to remove it. One day, she fell and cracked her ribs. Two months after her transplant, she started having psychotic episodes, a side effect of one of the medications she was on.

“When I really did go into total psychosis was when I woke up one morning and felt I was suddenly responsible for the sun coming up in the morning,” she laughs. “That’s a terrible responsibility.”

Though she has a sense of humor about it now, at the time, she says, “I was in a kind of purgatory that I thought I’d never get out of.”

When she did finally recover completely and get past the side effects, she began to donate her time on the transplant ward of Baylor Hospital, which was started in 1985.

“I work in the waiting room and talk to transplant families and let them know that you do live and have a normal life after a transplant,” she says. “It really has changed my life incredibly.” She’s also been to Washington, D.C., to help lobby congress over the way organs, and particularly livers, are distributed, a campaign that she calls “relatively successful.”

In addition to her activism, Lodewick credits her family, and particularly her two brothers, with helping her through her ordeal. And getting in contact with her donor family has also brought her some peace of mind. She received her liver from a 15-year-old boy named Noah, who was involved in an auto accident.

“I sent a letter a couple of months after my transplant to thank them,” she says. “It’s the hardest letter I’ve every written in my life. I immediately heard back from them and I know that they’re wonderful.”

Though she’s never met them in person, she and Noah’s mother, Marge, correspond regularly.

“She’s just as sweet as she can be. She has told me that that’s one thing that gives her some comfort, is to know that his death helped other people,” she pauses, visibly moved. “Every time I talk about it I tear up. I don’t think I will I ever get so that I don’t.”

Today, Lodewick is healthy and active, lifting weights and walking two miles every day. Her face and eyes seems to express an almost constant smile. Her ordeal has, quite obviously, changed the way she looks at her world.

“I think that it just natural that life means a lot more to you when it’s so threatened,” she says. “I think I’m happier than most people, because I just think I appreciate life.”