CLEVELAND — In one moment, a family can change forever. It was a tragic reality for the Zuercher family in Summit County.
In February 2021, Katie Dougherty Zuercher was faced with making end-of-life plans for her 14-year-old daughter, Eirelyn.
The Spring Garden Waldorf School eighth-grader was critically injured in a sledding accident.
"She had just gone through a year of, you know, the pandemic, of doing school virtually and hadn't seen her friends in a year, and they were making plans to go sledding together," said Dougherty Zuercher. "It was going to be the first time that they were all physically in the same space after being apart for so long, and at the sledding hill she had an unfortunate accident."
Eirelyn Zuercher
Eirelyn's mother, Katie, and father, Jared, went to the hospital to check on their daughter.
"He was on his way to the hospital, somebody else was driving him and on the way up there he suffered a heart attack and by the time I got there, they had been working on him for a little while and he ended up dying of, they said it was broken heart syndrome," said Dougherty Zuercher.
She said what she was going through at the time, with the sudden loss of her husband and making end-of-life plans for her daughter, was indescribable.
"But the staff both at Metro and at Lifebanc, I felt like they really came around me both physically, like in that space at the hospital, and also emotionally; they were very supportive through the whole process.”
Dougherty Zuercher said that support continues today.
"I have nothing but the highest praise for the staff at Metro but unfortunately they couldn't save her," she said.
She chose to make sure Eirelyn was an organ donor.
"I think one of the biggest fears that we have when we lose someone that we love is that they're going to be forgotten…and so knowing that Eirelyn is still impacting all of the lives, let's her live on and not just in like memories and stories of her but like in tangible, physical ways where she's still working in the world.”
According to Lifebanc Senior Director of External Relations Heather Mekesa, nearly 3,000 people are waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant in Ohio, and more than 100,000 are waiting in the United States.
"But the amount of people that end up having that opportunity to even, or families be asked that opportunity for donation is so limited," she said. "Seventeen people are dying every day because that list is just getting bigger or enough transplants aren't available.”
National Donor Day is on Feb. 14. It's a way to honor everyone involved in the organ donation process and encourage donation. You can register online through the Bureau of Motor Vehicles or the online national donor registry.
"What's most critical and most important, outside of being on your driver's license, is that talk with their family," Mekesa said.
Lifebanc is an organ procurement organization serving Northeast Ohio. Mekesa said there are myths surrounding organ donation. One of the biggest is that doctors won't save a patient who is a registered organ donor.
"The hospital does not even have access to know you're an organ donor, and their job is to save your life in which they do, and they take their oath to do.”
In the year after her daughter's accident, Dougherty Zuercher said she learned that her body was able to produce 76 muscular skeletal grafts that were distributed to recipients from the ages of 6 months old to 92 years old.
"I was just thinking of this one man that we knew who needed a liver and she was able to make an impact that literally spanned across the entire country," she said.
When she was planning those end-of-life plans, Dougherty Zuercher remembered a Facebook post from one of her parents' friends who needed a liver.
David Marucco lives in Pennsylvania now but spent 40 years in Akron.
"From 2019 until the transplant, I had 33 blood transfusions, 48 iron infusions and 13, no, 16 endoscopies to stop the bleeding," he said. "It's so difficult to find a transplant, people wait years for a transplant to know the joy that you're bringing somebody by donating your loved one's organ, it's just amazing, it's absolutely amazing… I'm a different person."
After years of being sick, Marucco is active again but also grateful and emotional about what's happened.
"I would have much rather given up my life or Eirelyn's life, it didn't happen that way, so I'm eternally grateful.”
Marucco always sends Dougherty Zuercher flowers on Eirelyn's donation anniversary.
"We just found out this year that David and my late husband actually shared a birthday," she said.
Eirelyn loved theater and was an artist. One of her designs is used on Lifebanc's first challenge coin. It's a "symbol of recognition awarded to people or groups that have a positive impact on organ, tissue and cornea donation and transplantation by exemplifying compassion and courage.”
One of those final acts of courage for Eirelyn was a hero's walk.
"We went from her hospital room to the operating room and we were able to walk, you know, beside her as they rolled her from one place to the next," said Dougherty Zuercher.
"The hallway of the hospital was lined with staff members who came out to honor her, and as someone who was so interested in theater, it felt very much like a standing ovation. It was like this last final recognition of a life well lived and lived beautifully and now shared."
