Observations placeholder
Donor fell from an apartment window
Identifier
005320
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
This paper reports key observations from 10 representative cases of transplant recipients who were open to sharing experiences of personal changes following their operations ... To protect the privacy of the donors' families, recipients and their families, physicians and hospitals, donors and recipients are referred to by number, except when their first names were mentioned by family members or friends in the transcripts. All recipients and family members or friends of the donors were interviewed by Pearsall and audiotaped. The transcripts were examined by Schwartz and Russek and selected for inclusion in this report.
Each of the 10 cases includes a donor family member's report (or equivalent), a recipient's report (or equivalent) and a recipient family member's or friend's report. Donor family members, recipients and recipient family members or friends are quoted directly from the transcripts. Personal opinions (including controversial content) are reported verbatim. Each case includes two to five sample parallels between the donors and changes observed in the recipients post transplant surgery
A description of the experience
Organ Transplants and Cellular Memories - Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 12, Number 3 (April - May 2005); Paul Pearsall, PhD ; Gary E. Schwartz, PhD ; Linda G. Russek, PhD
Case 9
The donor was a three-year-old boy who fell from an apartment window. The recipient was a five-year-old boy with septal defect and cardiomyopathy.
The donor's mother reported:
"It was uncanny. When I met the family and Daryl [the recipient] at the transplant meeting, I broke into tears. Then we went up to the giving tree where you hand a token symbolising your donor. I was already crying when my husband told me to look at the table we were passing. It was the donor family with Daryl sitting there. I knew it right away. Daryl smiled at me exactly like Timmy [the donor] did. After we talked for hours with Daryl's parents, we were comforted. It somehow just didn't seem strange at all after a while. When we heard that Daryl had made up the name Timmy and got his age right, we began to cry. But they were tears of relief because we knew that Timmy's spirit was alive."
The recipient reported:
"I gave the boy a name. He's younger than me and I call him 'Timmy'. He's just a little kid. He's a little brother like about half my age. He got hurt bad when he fell down. He likes Power Rangers a lot, I think, just like I used to. I don't like them anymore, though. I like Tim Allen on Tool Time, so I called him Tim. I wonder where my old heart went, too. I sort of miss it. It was broken, but it took care of me for a while."
The recipient's father reported:
"Daryl never knew the name of his donor or his age. We didn't know either until recently. We just learned that the boy who died had fallen from a window. We didn't even know his age until now. Daryl had it about right. Probably just a lucky guess or something, but he got it right. What is spooky, though, is that he not only got the age right and some idea of how he died, he got the name right. The boy's name was Thomas, but for some reason his immediate family called him 'Tim'."
The recipient's mother reported:
"Are you going to tell him the real twilight zone thing? Timmy fell trying to reach a Power Ranger toy that had fallen on the ledge of the window. Daryl won't even touch his Power Rangers any more..."