Cora's last smile
Cora Hill of Orlando, Florida, 22 years old, dying from cystic fibrosis and, having received a new pair lungs that in time failed, in chronic pain and too weak for another transplant, came to a decision: calmly, but definitively, she told her family she wanted to be taken off life support and donate her kidneys.
In this photo, courtesy of the Hill family, she is holding the baby of a friend. Two days later, her ventilator was switched off and the lives of two very sick people were transformed. Her mother, Dee (who is in the photo) says it was Cora’s last smile.
This is my son, seven-year old Nicholas Green, of Bodega Bay, California, who was shot in an attempted carjacking in Italy while we were driving on the main road south from Naples on a family vacation. My wife, Maggie, and I donated his organs and corneas, which went to seven very sick Italians, four them teenagers. Two of the seven were going blind, all the others could have died at any time. In the next ten years, organ donation rates in Italy, which were then just about the lowest in Europe, tripled – a rate of increase no other country came close to – so that thousands of people are alive who would have died. All around the world his story brought people’s attention to the acute shortage of donated organs and became known as ‘The Nicholas Effect.’