Transplant Rules Allow Directed Donation

Buck Rodgers Promised Liver Patient Elaine Rodgers That He'd Be There For Her

By Jean Lakeman Helms

Register Health Reporter

Love doesn't end with the grave, Florence Rodgers says.

About two weeks ago, the Saraland woman and her husband, Marlon "Buck" Rodgers, attended a benefit to raise money for a liver transplant for Buck's sister-in-law, Joyce Elaine Rodgers, of Eight Mile.

Elaine Rodgers, 52, had cared for Buck after his heart surgery last summer. Now she needed a liver transplant to survive.

At the benefit, Elaine said, Buck hugged her and told her "'Don't you worry about going to Birmingham and getting that transplant. If there's nobody else there, I'll be there.'"

As it turned out, Buck would be with her, though not in a way anyone could have imagined. In an incredible twist of fate, it would be Buck's liver Elaine would receive.

On Feb. 9, Buck Rodgers, 67, had a stroke. He was taken to a Mobile hospital; machines pumped air into his lungs and kept his heart beating, but his brain had stopped functioning.

"We knew that we'd lost him, that his brain was gone," Florence Rodgers said. "He'd always said 'Don't keep me alive like that.'"

She gave permission for her husband's organs to be used for transplant and for the machines to be disconnected.

"He had no more use for those body parts," Florence Rodgers said. "And what I wouldn't give if somebody could have given him something that could have helped him live longer."

Brain death is true death, said Chuck Patrick, director of the Alabama Organ Center in Birmingham.

"There's never been a patient - never - that woke up and went to medical school like you read in the (tabloids)."

Florence did have one question about the transplant procedure: Could Elaine have Buck's liver if the tissues matched?

The answer was yes.

"If you know a person on the (transplant) list that's waiting, that will more likely prompt you to donate, so they allow that," Patrick said of directed donations. The direction has to be to one person, he said, not to a certain race, ethnicity or religion.

"You can't direct to 'a veteran,' you can't direct to 'a white person.' That's wrong."

Meanwhile, Elaine Rodgers was on her way home from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, after being officially placed on a transplant waiting list. Her liver had been damaged by hepatitis C from a blood transfusion 25 years earlier. Today, sophisticated tests can detect the virus, and infected blood is discarded, according to Eleven Bouillon, technical services director at the American Red Cross blood center in Mobile.

While on the way back home from UAB, she and her husband, Roy, stopped at a relative's home in Georgiana and heard the news about Buck. The couple hurried to the hospital.

"The first person I saw there was my niece, and she asked me how I was doing," Elaine Rodgers said. "She said, 'Don't worry, you're going to feel better real soon.' I didn't dream what she meant."

Florence also was there.

"She grabbed me and hugged me," Elaine Rodgers said. "She said he was pronounced brain-dead and did I want to have his liver?"

"How could I not have made that decision?" Florence Rodgers said. "That's what he would have done if he'd been able to speak. He'd told her he was going to be with her."

The organ was a perfect match. After one more test by Buck's own physicians to verify brain death, Buck's life support system was disconnected and a UAB transplant team removed the liver.

Elaine Rodgers flew back to Birmingham with the team. Less than 24 hours after going on the waiting list, she had her new liver.

The wait could have been as long as a year, according to her doctors. About 70,000 Americans - 1,500 Alabamians - are awaiting transplants, Patrick said. Only about 20,000 transplantable organs become available each year, from about 5,000 donors; on average, 12 people each day die awaiting transplants.

Elaine Rodgers remains hospitalized in Birmingham, fighting high blood pressure and fluid on her lungs, but she expects to be home in a few weeks.

"It's like a dream that I'm just waking up from," Elaine Rodgers said. "It all happened so fast ... I haven't even had time to think about it yet, but I know it's a gift from God."

Florence Rodgers agrees.

"This is God. If anybody doesn't believe in God, look at this. If it had been any sooner, she wouldn't have been ready. It had to be his plan."

But has this gift of life helped ease Florence's grief?

"Yes, yes, yes. It helps tremendously. As heartbroken as I am losing him, to know that she's got a chance to live and have good health - I believe it's God's plan," she says. "Praise God, I had him for 46 years. I'm so thankful that love doesn't end with the grave."

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