Edina Hall

Dear friends,

As a pharmacy student, I worked many weekends at Boulder Community Hospital in Colorado. We were a small hospital, but also a trauma center. With so many people doing extreme sports, there was bound to be an accident nearby.  

One Saturday before Palm Sunday, a young man not too much older than me, was admitted to the ICU after a tragic climbing accident. He had not been wearing a helmet, lost his footing (or grip), and his forehead struck the rocks.   

Upon entering the ICU, one immediately knew which room was his. Family and friends poured out of his doorway and tears flowed. Too shy to disturb all the sorrow by my delivery, I skipped his room to return later. When I did, I found him alone lying in his bed with the afternoon light streaming across the white blankets shrouding his body. The only sign of trauma was a bandage around his head—there wasn’t even a drop of blood. If one didn’t know any better, he could have been mistaken for someone who was asleep—only he was not.   

I returned to work the next Saturday to find that he had taken a turn. Now intubated and diagnosed as brain-dead, the family was faced with difficult decisions and by shift’s end, he became an organ donor. There was a sorrow that filled the hospital; no one was immune.  

As I headed home that night with Easter looming, all the events of the day and Holy Week rumbling in my head, I found my thoughts reaching forward to the recipients. Deep in this sorrow and act of love, there would be new life given! A heart. A lung. Kidneys. People who might have thought it was their last days would be given LIFE. Can you imagine that phone call? Can you imagine the joy in another ICU with a new heart beating in a new body? I simply wept.  

By no means is this meant to be a public service announcement for organ donation. It is merely my yearly reflection of a family walking the path of sorrow during Holy Week, the gift of a dead young man and the joy of new life received. I may not fully comprehend or appreciate the sacrifice and love of Jesus or the ins and outs of the Resurrection, but this... this human experience gets me one step closer.    

In anticipation,

—Edina