Article Contributed on: 6/11/2007 8:43:45 PM
On June 9, 2001 Evergreen resident
Sherry Motley was about to sit down for a dinner of salad with a glass of wine, when the phone rang.
When she answered it was
Dr. Zamora, head of lung transplants at University Hospital.
He said, 'Sherry, it's Marty. What are you doing?"
Motley told the doctor she was getting ready to watch the Avalanche playoff game and have dinner. He said, "Have you eaten anything?" She said no.
He said, "Get down here, we have a lung for you."
Motley panicked, because her husband
, Jim, was in Golden. She called her priest at St. Laurence Episcopal Church in Conifer.
Dorothy Lee said she would be there right away. Then Motley called her sons and told them to track down her husband and get him to the hospital.
Motley said 10 minutes later her husband walked in the door and told he had decided not to stay at the car show down the hill.
"It was like it was meant to be," he said, remembering the evening. "She wasn't quite in the panic stage, but she was giving me so much information . . . it was like she was about to have a baby!"
When everyone met at the hospital, the family watched the Avs game and cheered when they won the Stanley Cup. "It broke the tension," said Jim.
The next day, Sherry went into surgery at 10:30 p.m. and emerged at 3:30 a.m. with a new lung and a new chance at life. It changed her life, it gave her life. Suffering from emphysema,, Sherry waited two years to get that phone call. "I could barely take 10 steps across the room. The doctors said I wouldn't make it past the fall without a new lung."
She takes 23 pills a day. She said people with lung transplants are more susceptible to germs than other organ recipients. "I am inhaling all the time in to my new organ. I can't be around anyone with the sniffles. I carry Purell with me constantly. When you go to University Hospital, you see people walking around with masks on and you know right away, they're lung transplant patients. We used to call ourselves the masked bandits," she joked.
Jim said her transplant revived the person she used to be. "She had stopped singing at church. Now she can sing."
The Motleys said they had written numerous letters to thank the family of the donor, whose identity is kept secret. All communication is handled by Donor Alliance. The Motleys were so grateful, everyone in the family and many of Sherry's friends wrote letters.
Sherry said, "You hate the thought that someone had to lose their life for you to live. Maybe it's part of God's plan. Maybe I had things I was still supposed to do.
I think about this person quite often. My kids, my family wrote letters, apparently the family doesn't want to accept these letters. And that's fine. Maybe it brings back too much hurt."
Jim had his own message for the donor. "To any donor. you aren't giving life to one person. The recipient of the part you gave gives extending life to the entire family. The whole community she was involved in, the church, her grandchildren. By extension, one donation affects so many people's lives. She is now working in the community and doing things she wouldn't have been able to do before."
Sherry said, although the donor's family had not answered their letters, she understood."I am hoping that my donor's family knows how much I appreciate it, my family appreciates it."
She added, "I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, "Please don't take your organs to heaven, heaven knows we need them here."