After a Heart Transplant, She Climbs Some of the World’s Toughest Mountains
Here is a photo of Kelly Perkins, who came from England to Southern California and has climbed some of the world’s most famous mountains with her husband, Craig, including the Matterhorn, Fuji and the awesome (what other word fits?) El Capitan in Yosemite.
All that, after having had a heart transplant in 1995, making it impossible for anyone who hears about these exhausting climbs to doubt that having a transplant can restore a terminally-ill patient to the peak of fitness. Good going, K.
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.’