Southwest Transplant Alliance

Aron "Mikey" Gamboa never had the chance to experience his teenage years. His parents never saw him graduate from high school or college, fall in love or get married.

The 11-year-old Bryan boy died while playing hide-and-seek with some friends. He found a hiding spot -- just two houses down from his McArthur Avenue home -- underneath a travel trailer that was not properly grounded. There, he was electrocuted. That was in June 2001, two months before he was to enter sixth grade.

His mother, Rosie Herrera, was forced to make a tough decision in a tragic moment, but it came easy: She decided to donate his organs.

What she couldn't anticipate is that her decision would enable a man who lived 200 miles away to see his daughter grow up and graduate from high school and college and, one day, to walk her down the aisle.

"It made me feel like somehow my son had not died in vain," Herrera said recently in the Mockingbird Room of the College Station Hilton Hotel.

Last weekend, Mikey's family and the man who received his heart, Buz Ingram, finally met -- nearly eight years after the transplant.

A lot of ground was covered in the meeting between Ingram, his wife, Jeanie, Herrera and her husband, Filemon, who is Mikey's stepfather, along with more than 30 members of Mikey's family, including five brothers and two sisters.

Family members recounted stories that highlighted Mikey's love of his family, church and sports. They remembered how he loved to watch wrestling on TV and in the process would start fights with the couch cushions.

More than anything, they remembered how the sweet, even-tempered boy whom they loved would change into a competitive, aggressive athlete when he was on the soccer field.

"He turned into a totally different kid," Herrera said. "You could tell he really had a passion for it."

His stepsister, Virginia Rodriguez, made the mistake of telling Mikey that if he scored three goals, she'd be his slave for the day.

"He did it, too," she said. "And as soon as he did, he yelled at me from the field 'Now you have to be my slave!' All he made me do was spend time with him and watch TV."

The call

It took the 49-year-old Ingram less than an hour from the time the Medical City Dallas Hospital transplant coordinator called him about the potential donor heart, until he was there and transplant ready. He had been on the transplant list for less than two months.

"I was in my backyard mowing the grass," he said. "There were other people on the list before me, but they couldn't contact them in time."

Doctors told him his heart was working at about 12 percent of what it should be, and he only weighed about 120 pounds.

Heart problems were nothing new to Ingram, though. He retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in June of 1999, after he had a heart attack on active duty.

"I was so sick for so long and didn't know it," he said.

Ingram was one of 100,000 patients per year in the United States in need of a live-saving transplant, while an average of 20,000 potential donors exist in the U.S.

"There will never be enough organs for everyone who needs one," said Pam Silvestri with the Southwest Transplant Alliance, based in Dallas. "because organ donors actually have to die in a hospital on a ventilator -- and only about 20,000 die that way in the U.S. every year."

About a quarter of those are not eligible to donate because of medical conditions.

One reason for the shortage is fear, she said.

"People don't want to talk about death," Silvestri said. "They don't want to think about death. People don't want to talk about organ donation because they don't want to talk about the end-of-life issues."

However, the number of people registering to donate is increasing.

"Texas actually does very well," she said. "We have 8,000 waiting on a transplant here, which is not quite 10 percent of the (national) list, and Texas provides more than 10 percent of the organs donated."

To ensure your organs will be donated, it is encouraged to not only register, but also to discuss your wishes with family.

"If you don't register and talk to them about it," she said, "then your family has to make the decision on your behalf. For a family to make that decision at a difficult time is not easy."

Donating a life

Herrera and Ingram are registered to be organ donors themselves. Ingram has been since he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps at age 18.

"I've been an organ donor for a long time," he said. "I never thought I'd be the recipient of one."

Herrera has been an organ donor since she was 22 years old, and has convinced most of her family, a majority of those present at the meeting, to become donors.

She also works on organ donor awareness campaigns, funded through federal grants. The last one she worked on was at Texas A&M University and combined informational tables with stories from those who have made the decision to donate.

"What really surprised me when I was talking to people is, it could be a big strong guy or a really feminine girl, and they'd both be worried about it," she said. "They just wouldn't understand what it's about."

She said of deciding to donate her son's organs -- which helped save four people -- the decision came at a difficult time, but was not difficult in itself.

"It was a spiritual thing," she said. "God put it on my heart. I just wanted to be able to help other families. Because of that, to me, my son is a hero."

Mikey saved Ingram with a heart donation, a recipient known only as Mary with a liver, a recipient known as Samantha with a kidney and an anonymous recipient with a kidney.

Ingram said he couldn't truly express how grateful he was for Herrera's decision to donate her son's organs.

"It's just impossible to say how thankful you are for something like this," he said. "I feel like I'm 17 again."

Organ donation

Anyone interested in signing up to be an organ donor can do so in just a few minutes.

* You can sign up through your local Department of Public Safety Office, or online.

* Visit www.donatelifetexs.org

* If you registered more than two years ago, you will not be considered an officially registered donor. This is because the online registry is new and needs to be updated.

* There are less than 275,000 on the registry in Texas, out of a state population of more than 25 million.

* By registering in advance, you save family members from making the decision to donate during a time of mourning.

SOURCE: Southwest Transplant Alliance