Telling the stories of donors and the lives they save
Hume-Lee wanted to tell the stories of organ donors and recipients, spread the word about living donation, and help families facing surgery understand what’s ahead.
An ongoing series of feature stories built on interviews with patients, families and surgeons, from a family that donated a loved one’s heart to a friend to the program’s robotic partial-liver transplants.
Stories that start on VCU Health’s website and often find their way into mainstream news.
The need
One organ donated is one life saved. VCU Health Hume-Lee Transplant Center wanted those lives, and the people behind them, to be seen.
The center had three goals for its stories. It wanted to tell the stories of donors, living or deceased, and of the people who receive their organs. It wanted to spread the word about living donation. And it wanted to help people facing these surgeries understand what lies ahead.
Our approach
Since 2020 we have worked as a close partner to Hume-Lee, interviewing patients, families and surgeons and writing their stories.
These are stories of heartache and happiness, tragedy and triumph. We talk with families whose loved one was saved by a transplant, with brothers and sisters who lost a parent or sibling and donated the organs, and with living donors who chose to give part of a liver or an entire kidney to a friend, a family member or a complete stranger. The stories are raw and powerful.
The series has covered a family that donated a loved one’s heart to a friend, a Hampton man whose Thanksgiving brisket was delayed by a transplant he will never forget, and two mothers who shared a heart transplant journey. We also wrote about the center’s use of a robot for partial living liver donor transplants. Hume-Lee’s living donor liver program was revived in 2019 with the hiring of Vinay Kumaran, M.D., who has performed more than 800 living donor liver surgeries, and the program includes Seung Duk Lee, M.D., who has more than a decade of training in robotic surgery.
The outcome
The stories start on the VCU Health website, and many of them find their way into mainstream news outlets from there. For Hume-Lee, each one does double duty: it honors a patient or a donor, and it helps the next family understand what is possible.