CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - JoAnne Burka has something in common with her boss.
There are the surface similarities, like how both currently work at The Printing Press, both have ink in their blood from full careers in the same industry and both live in Charleston. And they are both big animal lovers who have been known to share their food with their pets.
At first glance, that’s where the commonalities end.
There’s nearly a 20-year difference in age between Burka and her boss, Bob Underwood, and they haven’t known each other long. In fact, they don’t even see each other much at work, since Underwood isn’t at the print shop every day.
But the biggest thing they share is something that isn’t obvious at first, an experience that changed - and perhaps extended - several lives.
Both have been directly affected by organ donation. For Burka, it’s the giving end. For Underwood, the receiving end.
If you didn’t know it, you would never guess that Burka is a living kidney donor or that Underwood had a heart transplant a couple years ago. His decreased mobility might be the only clue, given that he had to relearn and redevelop gross motor skills after the life-changing procedure. His wife, Sandy, doesn’t follow too closely unless she has to.
Burka came on board in May to help Sandy and the rest of the Printing Press team. Sandy says she’s a God-send.
“I would never have known, until they said something,” Burka said. “They didn’t know when they hired me that I had donated.”
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Burka wanted to donate a kidney to her life-long friend, Dawn Gallo, in 2011 but learned she wasn’t compatible.
“She was my age,” Burka said. “We went to junior high and high school together. She had lupus and she dialyzed for 28 years.”
Gallo first got sick during a high school graduation trip when they were 18. She was misdiagnosed for awhile and finally they learned it was lupus.
“That was when her kidneys started shutting down and she started dialyzing,” Burka said. “Her own mom donated her kidney in the late ’80s/early ’90s and it rejected pretty soon after. That’s pretty much the closest match you could get back then.”
She felt disappointed when she learned her kidneys weren’t a match for Gallo. But she learned soon after that she could still help her friend.
“Somebody at the hospital said, ’You need to call this lady Michelle at CORE (The Center for Organ Recovery and Education) and she’ll get you started on the kidney exchange program,’” Burka said. “That’s where I could donate to somebody and that somebody’s friend will donate to Dawn.”
With the kidney exchange program, a total stranger could be a better match than a close relative. Just as Burka wasn’t a match for Gallo, the people who join the exchange program aren’t matches for their friends or family members, but still want to help. So they exchange kidneys.
“For Dawn, we were in the kidney exchange program but she passed away before we could get to the finish lane of it,” she said. “She had just turned 50.”
That was December 2011. Burka didn’t want to quit there.
“I just felt like two people died when she died,” Burka said. “I knew my kidney was never going to go to her and it was like now that person is not going to get my kidney and I just really felt like somebody else died with her. I just felt compelled to finish it and then do it in her memory.”
By April 2012, Burka had a recipient for her kidney through the same program.
“Everything is done in pairs,” Burka said. “It could be all over the country. When I started this exchange program, it started with me and ended with a string of seven kidneys all over the country. My kidney went to a lady in Maryland and somebody from her church donated for her to somebody in Ohio. It was Ohio, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland that was involved.”
The experience made her realize how effective organ donation is. It’s her hope that more people check the box on their driver’s licenses for organ donation.
Burka became a volunteer advocate for CORE after donating.
“They’re the liaison between the family and the doctors when somebody decides to be an organ donor,” Burka said. “A CORE representative comes in and makes all of that happen.”
As a volunteer, Burka helps spread awareness about becoming an organ donor and visits the Department of Motor Vehicles every quarter to make sure they have supplies on hand for people to sign up while they’re there.
An average of 54 percent of all United States adults were registered as organ donors in 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But figures from Donate Life America, which operates the CORE program, show the number is much smaller in West Virginia - where only 39 percent of adults are registered as organ donors.
“When you pass away, obviously we can’t take it with us,” Burka said. “Not only can you save up to eight lives because of the eight organs you can donate - two kidneys, two lungs, heart, pancreas, spleen, liver - and you can enhance up to 50 lives through tissue, corneas, bone, ligaments, muscle and skin. When you’re an organ donor, they’ll take you and take whatever they can at that time. There’s no age limit. Everything is determined at the time of your death and what’s viable and what can be used.”
Sandy and Bob also feel strongly about organ donation. Without it, they know Bob wouldn’t have a functioning heart.
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Bob’s left ventricle muscle had deteriorated to the point that it wasn’t functioning.
Frighteningly, he went through two pacemakers before a short-term solution was available.
In 2015, he was recommended for a left ventricular assist device known as an LVAD. It works like an artificial heart by pumping blood to meet the body’s needs.
Bob had to carry the battery for the machine around with him at all times. It was a temporary solution until a real heart was available to transplant. But finding a heart isn’t easy.
“Cleveland Clinic thought that that would probably give him a good quality of life,” Sandy said. “Unfortunately the LVAD didn’t work. He did that for a year but he kept going downhill.”
He was in the hospital four months before a heart was found in 2016.
The heart came from a man in Savannah, Georgia.
“We don’t know much but we assume it was an accident,” Sandy said. “He was in his 50s and had a pretty good heart.”
By the time Bob got the heart for transplant, his own heart was functioning at two percent, Sandy said.
“When I got home from the hospital, I had to learn to do all kinds of stuff that had become second nature to me,” Bob said.
“He basically had to learn how to walk, talk and eat,” Sandy added. “He was in physical therapy for about six weeks before he got to come home.”
Bob and Sandy advocate for organ donation through wearing “Donate life” pins and support the transplant center at Cleveland Clinic.
“We all are organ donors,” Sandy said. “When you go through that, you realize how critically important being a donor is, or being a potential donor. You can’t take it with you, so give it away and let someone else use it.”
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Information from: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, https://wvgazettemail.com.
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