New Haven Independent

The beloved Yale Medical School student, whose death in a traffic accident on April 19 nearly a year ago helped to spark a citywide Safe Streets movement, was a donor of four of her organs.

Rainof’s was one of several moving stories told in an event at the Yale-New Haven Hospital to mark the beginning of Donate Life Month, a national effort to raise awareness about the importance of organ donation.

Mila’s gift,” said Rainof’s dean at the medical school, Dr. Nancy Angoff, “is responsible for saving the lives of four other people.”

“Statewide,” said Kari Mull, Donate Life Connecticut’s program coordinator, “we have 972,000 people signed up to be organ donors. But that’s only 37 percent of the population,” she added. “Utah’s got 67 percent.”

Because making a match between a patient and an organ is extremely difficult, increasing the pool of organ donors is critical. That was one of the Monday event’s key messages.

It’s not just major organs that are needed, but the eye, bone, and other tissues.

Mull told the story of her sister Amanda, killed at age 22 in a horrific car crash. “Although she was registered as a donor, her organs could not be used because of the damage. But,” said Mull to a packed East Pavilion audience of donors, recipients, and their families in the hospital’s lobby, “her skin gave life to several burn victims.

“Her veins helped several other people having bypasses; her bones went to 23 different patients; her corneas went to a 68 year-old man and a 17-year old girl, and Amanda’s two heart valves were given to a nine-year-old girl. All these wonderful gifts are the only good things that came out of her death, but it’s a lot.”

Most major organs need to be preserved under hospital conditions, she said, where they receive blood and oxygen, otherwise they decay. Rainof was struck by traffic on April 19. She died at Yale-New Haven on the following day, and her parents consented to the transplantation, Angoff said.

Today 500 patients at YNHH alone are awaiting transplantation. Nationally 100,000 people are awaiting, and only 8,000 organ transplant operations are done annually.

Part of the event was a recognition award given by Kevin O’Connor on behalf the New England Organ Bank to Yale and its leader CEO and President Marna Borgstrom by the New England Organ Bank in recognition of YNHH achieving a national benchmark: 75 percent of the patients who were organ donors potentially, actually gave organs.

The hospital gets to raise a Donate Life flag, as are other institutions, schools, and libraries across the country this month, said Mull.

Dr. Sukru Emre, the overall director of Yale’s Transplantation Center, was given the credit by Borgstrom for turning Yale’s transplant center into the flagship of the state.

Emre, who since the weekend had supervised two liver, three kidney, and one heart transplants, said, “We are doing fine on the operations. We need more donors. Here’s what I tell everybody: Don’t take your organs to heaven. Heaven knows we need them here!”

Patsy Twohill (pictured with Dr. Emre) received a new heart eight years ago. She had had excessive chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease when she was a kid, but was cured at 14. Seventeen years later, congestive heart failure set in. She waited for three years, she said, and was one of the lucky ones. She received the heart of a young man who died of a brain aneurism. She shared the letter his mother sent her.

“I hope what I do with my life does justice to his,” she said.

You can register largely through the DMV. Next week, Mull said, donatelife.org will have an easy way to do it online.

In the hallway outside the proceedings, Larry Zegzdryn, a clinical engineer at the hospital, said he’d been thinking of becoming a donor for years. He hasn’t taken the step because it reminds him of his mortality and he was concerned that his age was a problem. The workers at the table disabused him of the age notion and told him to talk to his family on the matter and then to sign up.

According to Dr. Emre the two other myths about organ donation are that when you sign up, hospital staff won’t work as hard to save you if you become a patient because they are eager for your organs. “Complete myth,” he said. “Likewise, the myth that when a patient dies, the cost of harvesting the organs must be borne by family. Not so.”

At the conclusion of the event, Dr. Emre went up to Dr. Angoff. They reminisced about Mila Rainof and her legacy. It isn’t well known, Dr. Angoff said, that Rainof had completed every requirement in her work at Yale and she was do to graduate just before she was killed. “Most people don’t know,” she said, “that Mila was awarded her degree from Yale Medical School posthumously.”

Before the meeting broke up, Dr.Emre asked Dr. Angoff if she would help him establish a memorial lecture in the transplantation unit in honor of Mila Rainof, the first lecture to take place this fall.

Angoff said she would be more than pleased.