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Fascinating news published this week by CNN. Full story here.

Says the article: “If you are on dialysis like approximately 400,000 other Americans, then your life could change for the better in the next couple of years thanks to some new biomedical engineering.

“The technology, announced this week at an American Heart Association conference on emerging technology, enables engineers to grow sheets of human cells in a laboratory, and then synthesize them into tubes, mimicking human blood vessels. Alternatively, the human cells, which come from skin cells, can be made into threads and then woven into the form of blood vessels.”

April is National Donate Life Month and features an entire month of local, regional and national activities to help encourage Americans to become organ, eye and tissue donors. As it comes to a close this year, I am pleased to say that it’s been a great month!

Organ Procurement Organizations and hospitals around the country held events to promote donor registration and honor donor families. Media coverage has been overwhelming, including fantastic stories on Oprah and ESPN (the latter you can check out right here on our website.)

At AlloSource, we spent the month focusing on sharing the stories of donor families and tissue recipients. It is through personal anecdotes like these that the gift of tissue donation and the possibilities of tissue transplantation can be better understood. We continue to make this important education an ongoing mission.

Scroll down for numerous posts about the media coverage and donation activities from Donate Life Month. We hope April has inspired and invigorated you as much as it did us.

It was the holidays in 2005 and Sarah Tomicich was a young professional excited about her new job in the finance department of a large Denver company. Fun-loving and outgoing, Sarah was happy to offer up her talents for the playful “Stupid Human Tricks” competition at the company’s annual year-end party.

Sarah’s trick was a squirm-inducing move she’d been doing since she was a little girl: rising up on her tip toes, she would rotate her feet until her toes were pointing straight behind her body, with her legs still together. But the trick didn’t go smoothly this time.

“My ankle popped; I thought I broke it,” Sarah said. “The pain was so bad. It was horrible.”

During an initial trip to the doctor, Sarah’s injury was misdiagnosed as a sprain. She went home hoping it would heal on its own. For the next several years Sarah tried to deal with the pain, but her ankle was never the same. The injury began to take a serious toll on her active lifestyle: she could no longer do the things she loved, including skiing and running. She would push herself to play team sports like kickball, but be miserable from the pain for days afterwards.

An eventual trip to an ankle specialist revealed what Sarah already had a suspicion of: her injury was much more serious than a sprain. In fact, the peroneal tendon on the outside of her foot was torn, and worse, a large portion of the cartilage on her ankle joint had torn off. Although her tendon was repaired with a surgery, initial attempts to heal the joint were unsuccessful. Sarah had lost too much cartilage, a tissue the body is incapable of reproducing.

Sarah’s doctor suggested treatment with an autograft, whereby bone and cartilage from her own knee would be transplanted into the injured ankle. As luck would have it, by now Sarah was working for one of the nation’s premier tissue banks, AlloSource. Here she had become aware of the tissue transplantation process. Sarah knew that although frequently used to treat injuries, autografts could lead to other complications: in her case the potential for infection in her healthy knee, a slower recovery from two surgeries and more.

Sarah urged her doctor to consider an allograft transplant, a gift of life from a deceased donor. The decision was made to use one of the newer allografts available thanks to new science: juvenile cartilage. These grafts, bravely donated by the families of donors just one month to 12 years old, had been found to stimulate new cartilage growth when implanted with stem cells.

Following her tissue transplant, Sarah’s results have been miraculous. After a final surgery in December 2010, her doctors found that cartilage is indeed regenerating in Sarah’s ankle.

“It’s fascinating to see this cartilage re-growing,” Sarah said. And she is able to feel the benefits already. “I can ski again and it doesn’t hurt. I’ve started to wear high heels again; I haven’t worn high heels for years! It feels really good.”

Her work at a tissue bank has heightened Sarah’s respect for her second chance at a healthy life: “I have had the opportunity to see it from the perspective that everyone should see it from; I have interacted with donor families and really comprehend that this is a gift of life that somebody else gave to me because they lost their own.”

Sarah also reports a stronger kinship with her colleagues at AlloSource, who work 24/7 to process donated human tissue into allografts used for a host of surgical applications around the country.

“Processing these allografts is tedious and includes a lot of hard work. I’ve been able to thank the techs I work with for what they do every day.”

We are honored to share this video blog from donor parents Pat and Jay Landers of Springfield, IL. Here Pat and Jay remember their son, Ryan, who was killed in a car accident and became an organ and tissue donor. So far, Ryan’s gifts have impacted 61 recipients in at least 12 states and Korea through 2 organ, 54 tissue and 5 vascular transplants.

Pat and Jay share in their own words what it has meant to them to be a donor family.

We were so pleased to meet this brave donor family via the Gift of Hope organ procurement organization.

More information about Jake on this memorial Facebook page.

Those of you who are on Facebook, we would appreciate your support in “liking” the page. Please invite your friends and family to do the same. For those of you without Facebook accounts, don’t worry, you can still view our Facebook at any time, as it is a public page.

Debby, a 50-year-old senior human resources generalist from Lebanon, IN, had for several of years suffered from a degenerative arthritic condition in her spine that resulted in constant neck pain. While she saw a chiropractor weekly and the therapy would provide momentary relief, nothing fully eradicated the problem.

As her condition progressed her back pain began taking a greater toll on her body. “I was having numbness in my arms and hands. I had headaches all the time,” said Debby.

Her doctor referred her to an orthopedic surgeon, who gave Debby some serious news: it wasn’t a matter of if she was going to need spinal surgery, but when. Two of Debby’s discs were protruding and pushing on her spinal cord. The surgeon warned her that waiting much longer to have surgery would lead to permanent nerve damage.

Debby decided to pursue the surgery, which included transplanting two new spinal discs from a human tissue donor. The procedure sounded daunting.

“It involved cutting through my throat to get to my spine and pushing my esophagus and trachea out of the way,” Debby said. She was also concerned about her body rejecting the donor discs. “I thought, ‘what if they don’t take?’ There’s always a risk of rejection.”

However, Debby had the surgery in June of 2010 and it was a great success. After six weeks in a neck brace, Debby has experienced a dramatic recovery.

“It’s a huge difference. It’s fabulous,” she said. “I don’t have the daily headache or the constant tightness in my shoulders all the time.  I owe my recovery to an excellent orthopedic surgeon and to God my savior.”

Debby has returned to the things that make her happy: maintaining her garden and spending time truly playing with her grandchildren.  “I have six grandchildren and I want to spend the rest of my time with them. I want to go to the park and jump on a swing and do all those fun things,” she said.

Debby is conscientious about protecting her neck and her gift of life. She is now more careful about lugging heavy bags, her posture when she gardens, etc. Also, she is grateful to have learned about the possibilities of tissue donation and the miracle it made in her life.

“You don’t hear about people giving disc donations,” Debby said. “It’s very important and it’s something that I want to make my family aware of.”

Happy New Year,

As you may know, every year we sponsor a float rider on the Donate Life Float in the Tournament of Roses Parade. The float features organ and tissue transplant recipients, living donors and family members of deceased donors from around the country, joined together in celebration and remembrance of the spectacular gift of life. It is a great opportunity for us to continue telling the story of tissue donation and transplantation.

This year our float rider was 20-year-old cancer survivor and bone recipient Parker Simpson, originally from Aurora, CO.  Parker went to school with my sons and I know his story of courage and perseverance on a personal level.  He had an inspiring experience while in Pasadena for the parade.

Also attending the event were three AlloSource employees. These employees were selected to attend after sharing stories about donation and what attending the Rose Parade would mean to them.  The best submissions were selected by the AlloSource Executive Leadership Team.  This year’s attendees were each personally impacted by donation and it’s these experiences that drive them every day.  Their experiences at the Rose Parade brought the true meaning of the “gift of life” full circle.

Please read on to check out some fantastic media coverage of Parker’s story, photos, videos and anecdotes from the parade. A fantastic reminder and a great way to kick off the New Year: with positive stories about the amazing possibilities of tissue donation.

Here’s to a great 2011!
Tom