Patient's Plea From Heart

Marcella Russell moved to the country to die.

She sold her home in Howick and, with husband Fred and their children, brought an old house in Waiuku.

"I thought it would be easier for Fred to take care of the children."

Marcella, 59, had congenital heart problems from birth, and a bout of rheumatic fever weakened her heart further, leaving her on borrowed time.

A heart operation at 16 just postponed the inevitable. The only reason she is alive today is because someone else gave her their heart.

The former art teacher says she wants organ donation to be talked about in New Zealand families and schools, as too few people realise how important it is. She doesn't say people should give up their organs if they don't want to, only thay they should talk about it. "People need to discuss it with their families, so their family knows what their wishes are."

She once met the mother of a small boy who had donated his organs after his sudden death. The mother told Marcella she knew only that her son would have wanted it because he'd happend to see her driver's licence and asked what the word donor meant the day before he died.

Marcella's own heart was donated by a man in his mid-20's, the same age her sons were at the time. "When I first heard, it was like somebody punched me in the gut," she says.

For months after that operation four years ago, her eyes welled up whenever she thought of the sacrifice the man's family had made, to give her his heart when they must be grieving.

"I feel I have an obligation to make the most of the gift that they gave me. Its a debt I can never repay," she says.

Marcella's occupation before she retired, as a teacher Kidz First hospital school at Middlemore, brought her into contact with children in a similar situation to herself. As for Marcella's old heart, she's passed that on to someone else she loves - by burying the heart in a wooden box at her grandmother's grave site in Taranaki.