Nine months after football legend Walter Payton told the world he was on the list for a liver transplant, his death touched fan Aimee Zabrin of Wheeling."My heart goes out to his son (Jarrett) most of all as a freshman in college. I've been through that freshman year," Zabrin says knowingly.
The 20-year-old junior at Bradley University in Peoria also has been through the hopes and fears that greeted Walter Payton and everyone else who goes on a waiting list for an organ transplant.
Even knowing all she knows about the myriad uncertainties of organ transplants - from plain old luck (good and bad) to the risk of the additional health problems that eventually dropped Payton from the waiting list - Zabrin admits she just sort of figured Payton would get a liver.
"He's Walter Payton," she says, noting that two lessons we all can take from the star's demise is that fame and fortune don't make life-and-death decisions, and life would be better if everyone possible donated organs and made sure those wishes are known before a grief-stricken relative is asked to make a spur-of-the-moment emotional decision in a hospital.
The idea that someone else, someone who isn't famous, got a life-saving liver because Walter Payton was dropped from the waiting list is impossible to determine, Zabrin says.
"It's so anonymous," she says of the patients on the organ donation waiting list. Zabrin was on the list because cancer treatment she received as a toddler damaged her heart. Without a transplant, she'd have died at age 14. She spent three-and-a-half-months in Children's Memorial Hospital waiting for a heart.
"I didn't even know where I was on the list," she says, noting there is no Top 20 list similar to the ranking of sports teams. "I just knew I was on the list."
When she got a new heart on April 30, 1994, "that's the only time my parents knew I was the No. 1 person nationally," Zabrin says. The new heart from Texas was too large and Zabrin spent three days with her chest open.
"The doctors kept me on the list and I was still No. 1," she says. "Three days later I got a heart and that's the one I have now."
She still exchanges letters and Christmas cards with her "donor family" - the parents of a 10-year-old girl who was killed in Minnesota.
What if that Minnesota girl hadn't died? What if Zabrin had taken a turn for the worse? What if someone else moved ahead of her on the list and got that heart? What if some other child died because there wasn't another heart? What if? What if?
"You can't let that stuff get to you," says Zabrin, who was a dancer and golfer at Wheeling High School. "Of course I'm thankful and I'll always be thankful for the rest of my life."
But the goal of an organ transplant is to help someone else live, and Zabrin is doing that just fine.
She's rush chairman at her Chi Omega sorority at Bradley, where members wore green ribbons during Rush Week to call attention to the need for organ donation. A radio and TV major, Zabrin's a reporter doing on-air interviews for a Bradley University TV program called "Midstate Magazine."
During an internship with a radio station, she hosted one show featuring a spokeswoman from the Regional Organ Bank of Illinois and a donor family.
When Zabrin was near death and undergoing her heart transplants, Payton was a Hall of Fame running back with restaurants and race cars and business deals and a bright future. Now Zabrin is the one with the bright future.
All because of people who tried to find something positive in death by giving life-saving organs to others. Zabrin says signing up to be an organ donor and making that decision well known in your family would be a nice tribute to Payton.
