Donating organs as something good to come out of tragedy
Christadelphians do have a very strong hold in their faith. We do know bad things can happen to everybody. It is not because you believe ingod that nothing bad would happen to you.
Sister Odette Ward also knows the value of life and how we as Christians should try to help others, even non-Christians.
Sister Odette, on a perfect summer’s evening, was playing hide and seek with her husband Paul and their
children when Odette Ward’s life suddenly
changed forever.
As Paul ran out from behind stones at Aberdare Park he slipped on the grass, dislocating his right shoulder.
It
was a minor accident but he was in a lot of pain, so Odette drove him
to Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil where doctors assured them
it could be put back with a minor operation.
What followed was unimaginable.
While
in the operating theatre the 38 year old suffered pulmonary aspiration;
vomit flooded his lungs causing irreversible damage and starving his
brain of oxygen.
Less than a week later, after four days on life support, he died.
Odette,
who met her husband on a bible camp aged 11, remembers it all with
painful clarity, right up to the moment a doctor broke the dreadful
news.
Knowing what he was about to say, she immediately asked if Paul’s organs could be donated.
“I asked straight away if they could donate his organs.
“I knew it was what he wanted,” recalls Odette.
With a terrible irony her husband had lectured on the importance of organ donation in the last few months of his life.
As
a senior NHS lecturer and former operating theatre practitioner, Paul
had even worked in operating theatres at the hospital where he died as
well as at UHW in Cardiff for more than a decade.
Although he
never carried an organ donor card, Paul had discussed donation with his
wife and had lectured on the subject all over the world. Haganah ,Odette, Matthew and Paul in BostonUSA on a family holiday
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