Donate Life - Valerie Pryor's Story
On August 20, 1995, the story of my brother’s life began. My mother had a tubal ligation and four years later, she found herself pregnant again. My parents each had two girls separately and together had myself. This baby was a boy, and she frequently called him “their miracle.” We lost our dad in 2013, after being sick for many years - my brother was 17. We lost our mom in 2016, it was sudden – my brother was 20. He struggled greatly most of his life, he ended up in a deep depression, and turned to alcohol and substance abuse. On July 31, 2023 we got the phone call that every family member of an addict dreads. He had an overdose and had to be placed on life support. My sisters and I raced to Hannibal, where we learned he had an anoxic brain injury. He and I had conversations about end of life, and I knew he would not want to be kept on a ventilator if he would not have any chance of living a normal life. On August 2, we took turns saying goodbye to our baby brother two weeks shy of his 28th birthday, and we watched him slip away.
We knew we could not let drugs be the end of his story, so we spoke with the organ team. Unfortunately, his lungs were damaged from so many years of smoking and his heart was without oxygen for too long. They were, however, able to use his spleen and both kidneys. In the end, he was a miracle not only to our family, but three others as well.
Learn More
To learn more about organ and tissue donation, visit our Donate Life page. To register to become a donor in Illinois, visit https://www.lifegoeson.com/.