Volunteer Spotlight
Gift of lungs motivates recipient to share her spirit
Debora Dearring adds names to the Michigan Organ Donor Registry
© Photo by Heather Nash
Debora’s voice is louder now, powered by healthy lungs and determination to help others. During her months at the Detroit hospital, growing weaker as she waited, “I refused to give up on myself,” she said. “There’s always hope. Never diminish that. Sometimes it’s all you have.” She handed out index cards, asking visitors and hospital staff to jot down encouraging words. The cards covered her room’s walls, more than 330 in all. “I’d look at the cards and think, ‘OK, I can do this.’” After her 2015 transplant, Debora visited and reassured nervous transplant candidates when doctors or nurses asked her to spread her positivity. One day she encountered a transplant candidate mired in negativity and asked him what made
BY TERRI FINCH HAMILTON
Debora Dearring visits churches and community events to share her transplant story and help people join the Donor Registry. him happy. He brightened up and told her how he built model railroads, so Debora helped him fill a poster board with pictures of his trains and smiling loved ones. He got his new lungs. They still keep in touch. “There’s joy in just knowing you can help someone else,” Debora said. Soon she was visiting area churches and community events, sharing her story and signing people up on the Michigan Organ Donor Registry. “I’ll go anywhere and set up a table, you better believe it,” Debora said. When she spoke at her church, New St. Mark Baptist Church, she signed up 20 new organ donors on the spot. Every time somebody stops at her folding table and registers, it’s a
Debora Dearring lived at Henry Ford Hospital for nine months, seven of them waiting and praying for a double-lung transplant that would save her life. The days and months were long and she was grateful for any little kindness. When the kitchen sent up her favorite not-on-the-menu fried eggs, she cried. Debora, 63, was diagnosed in 2010 with sarcoidosis — a chronic disease that caused debilitating lesions in her lungs. Her doctor’s news was shocking: She couldn’t leave the hospital until she had new lungs. “I thought I’d be there two weeks, maybe a month, tops,” she said. “The day they finally told me I was getting lungs, I could barely scream, but I screamed as much as I could.”
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Gift of Life Michigan | golm.org
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