Gathering at hospital honors organ donors

Click Here to Recommend Story View larger image Taylor White, 10, was the recipient of a heart transplant. Taylor hangs a leaf on a tree at the Winchester Medical Center's cafeteria, where those involved with organ donation were honored. Dennis Grundman/Daily View larger image Tracey Waybright holds a picture of her husband, Kenneth, who died after a shooting. His heart was harvested for transplant. Dennis Grundman/Daily Related News

By Garren Shipley -- gshipley@nvdaily.com

WINCHESTER -- Sometimes one decision can turn one family's tragedy into another's joy.

Such was the message Friday, as families of organ donors, organ recipients and transplant physicians gathered Friday at Winchester Medical Center to remember those who gave life to others.

Organ donation was one of the last things on Tracey Waybright's mind when she had to make the decision last summer.

A stray bullet outside a Martinsburg, W.Va., nightclub in 2008 claimed the Stephens City resident's husband, Kenneth, leaving her and her two children alone.

Police only arrested the alleged gunman this week.

"It's hard when you lose someone you love," Waybright said. "My husband was a good man and I know that he wanted to be an organ donor. I'm glad that people got to live even though he passed."

Circumstances didn't make the decision any easier. The bullet left her husband on life support, but with no brain function.

"He was brain dead, and I made the decision. He would have wanted it that way," she said.

Making the decision to donate is literally giving the gift of life.

That's what happened to Sabrina Welsh, of Winchester. Her daughter, Taylor White, was born with a heart condition.

"She seemed to do well with medications for 10 years, then this last February her condition started to deteriorate," Welsh said.

After an evaluation at a Pennsylvania hospital, the all-important phone call came in August -- on Welsh's 30th birthday.

"I never would have thought that she would get the gift of life on my birthday," she said.

White, now a healthy 10-year-old, has rebounded from her operation well enough to socialize and meet other transplant families on Friday.

"It was very scary for a while," Welsh said. "You sit there and you wait and you pray that your child will receive a heart so they can live, but then knowing that on the opposite side someone is going to have to die."

Taylor was one of the lucky ones. "She was on the list about five weeks," Welsh said.

More than 2,600 Virginians are on waiting lists for a major organ, but fewer than 800 people in the commonwealth, living or dead, donate organs in an average year, according to statistics for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Welsh's joy is tempered with sorrow, though, for the family of the 11-year-old boy who lost his life.

Welsh said she has written a letter to the parents of the boy, thanking them for their decision, but hasn't yet met them.

For her part, the difference has been extraordinary, said a bashful Taylor.

"I can run and stuff," she said. "I'm not cold as much."