“What appears to be the end may really be a new beginning.” That’s the message on Jan Frye Hill’s office wall at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center’s Comp Rehab.

The statement has special meaning for Jan, who volunteers at Carolina Donor Services, a federally funded organ-procurement organization. Her life has been touched by every aspect of the gift of organ donation: Her mother received a liver transplant; her husband chose to donate his organs; and she received donor bone tissue in her wrist.

“I look at it every day,” says Jan, of the phrase on her wall. “It pertains to so many aspects of my life.”

It Meant My Life
Jan’s mother, Erlene Frye, received a liver transplant 15 years ago, when she was 64 years old. In 1992, the nondrinker and nonsmoker had learned that she had liver disease that could only be cured by a transplant, which she received in 1994. “It meant my life,” Erlene reveals. “Every day I’m thankful.”

Carolina Donor Services works with 104 hospitals in 79 counties in North Carolina to coordinate organ and tissue donation for the region and to educate the public about donation, according to Beth Hinesley, community relations coordinator. In North Carolina, nearly 3,000 people are waiting for transplants, and in 2008 nearly 200 patients died waiting. In fact, every 12 minutes a new name is added to the waiting list.

After her mother’s transplant, a longtime family friend phoned Jan. Jim Hill had grown up in Jan’s hometown of Mount Airy, where her parents still live. Their conversation renewed their friendship, which eventually blossomed into romance.

The Decision to Donate
A UNC Chapel Hill graduate, Jim joked with Jan that he’d chosen to major in chemistry because, “ ‘I decided if I could do that, I could do anything I wanted to do,’ ” she recalls. He was vice president of Demand Solutions, a worldwide computer company, and in 1990 he was Winston-Salem’s champion in the city’s doubles tennis competition.

After two years of courtship, Jim took Jan to San Francisco, and as they sat on a bench near the Golden Gate Bridge, he got down on his knee and proposed. He’d chosen the spot because his parents had celebrated their 25th anniversary there, and Jan remembers him telling her, “ ‘I thought it was symbolic for us to begin our life here.’ ”

The couple married September 7, 1996. Jim changed his address on his license, and he told Jan that after seeing the impact donation had had on his mother-in-law’s life, he’d added the heart to his license to indicate that he wanted to be an organ donor.

Three months later as they prepared for their first Christmas as a family, Hill went to pick up his daughter, Elizabeth, at school, and was hit by a car. He was taken to WFUBMC, where Jan had worked for 20 years as a neurology and neurosurgery nurse. The physicians were unable to save him.

At 38 years old, Jim was able to donate his heart, both kidneys, both corneas, and liver cells.

“I had to decide at that point: How was I going to go on?” Jan says. “I decided one of the things I could do would be to give back.”

Because she’d been on both sides of organ donation, Jan knew she had a unique story to share. Three years after Jim’s death, she began volunteering with Carolina Donor Services.

The Gift of Life
Each year, Carolina Donor Services holds a Gift of Life memorial service, and both donor families and recipients have the opportunity to attend. One rainy evening, Terry Hall, a kidney recipient, and his wife, Sandi, sat in the audience.

As soon as Terry saw Jan, who was scheduled to be a speaker that evening, he says he knew that she was important to his family.

“I cannot explain it,” says Terry, a retired disabled veteran of the U.S. Air Force. “I am a realist; I don’t believe in stuff like that, but I cannot deny it: I knew her face; I knew her voice.”

Though donor families are informed of the age and basic description of the recipient of their loved one’s organs, strict anonymity is enforced in the process unless both families indicate a desire to meet or talk.

Though neither Terry nor Jan knew it before the evening began, Terry confirmed with his donor coordinator that evening that he had in fact received one of Jim’s kidneys.

“I’m not sure that’s something you can put into words,” says Terry of what the gift meant to him. He and Sandi had married in August 1987, and a few years later, he was diagnosed with kidney disease. He continued working in the Air Force even after he became ill, including six months while he was on dialysis.

By the time he received the kidney transplant in December 1996, Sandi’s 6-foot-3-inch husband weighed only 140 pounds, she recalls. He was 29 years old, and they had a 4-year-old daughter.

“It meant he had another chance at living, not just surviving,” says Sandi, a trauma and ICU nurse at WFUBMC who has had two more daughters since Terry received the transplant. “It’s the ultimate gift. You can’t give a gift greater than the gift of life.”

After a decade, Terry’s kidney failed, and he needed a second transplant that he received in June 2006 from a living donor who works at Carolina Donor Services.

“We understand how fortunate we are,” Terry says. “I’ve had a third chance.”

Butterfly Beginnings
“It’s been a difficult journey,” Jan admits. “I’ve been able to see the wonderful effects of donation, and that has comforted me with the loss. I feel that not only did [Jim] help save and enhance lives, he helped new life begin.”

Due to complications from his medications, Terry is now the stay-at-home parent in their family, and he’s able to spend more time with their three daughters, ages 5, 9, and 16. “It’s given me an opportunity that I never would have had.”

In 2007, Erlene was named Volunteer of the Year for Northern Hospital in Surry County, and she continues to stay active with her church and regularly volunteers at the hospital.

“All I can say is God has a purpose for every life,” says the petite 79-year-old. “You can always say an encouraging word. I think that’s what life’s all about. We need to encourage one another.”
Jim’s daughter Elizabeth is an ICU and trauma nurse at WFUBMC. When she married two years ago, she and her husband released a basket of butterflies to remember loved ones who couldn’t be with them.

When they opened the whicker basket, a single butterfly fluttered behind the newlyweds as they walked down the aisle to start their new life together. Then, touchingly, it paused to rest on Elizabeth’s bouquet of white roses.

GIVE THE GIFT
To become an organ and tissue donor, talk to your family about your wishes, request that a heart symbol be placed on your driver’s license, and register at donate http://www.lifenc.org. For more information, go to http://www.carolinadonorservices.org.