Cavan natives to promote organ Donor Week

A Ballinagh woman is one of the organ recipients to highlight the enormously positive impact a donor made to her life.

Siobhan Brady describes her health journey which led to her undergoing a combined kidney and pancreas transplant in 2020 at St Vincent's Hospital in a short film which will be played at tomorrow's launch of Organ Donor Awareness Week.

While the event will be held in the Mansion House, Dublin tomorrow morning, Siobhan's story will be conveyed via video as she is currently in Dubrovnik enjoying her first holiday since her transplant.

In the moving short film, Siobhan explains how she was a diabetic and on a work trip to India in 2012 she picked up an E coli infection which caused organ failure.

"Living with organ failure is hard, but there is hope. While I always felt that one part of my life wasn't exactly easy, it didn't have to have an impact on every part of my life. There's always joy to be found in life, you just have to accept the hardships and try to make peace with them.

"When I think about my donor and my organ donor family, it's with an outpouring of love and gratitude from the very depths of my soul, and I can only hope that some of that sentiment reaches their own hearts.

"I like to think of my Dad and my donor hugging it out in heaven, as I would hope to at some stage."

Siobhan acknowledges the tragedy of death, but stresses the impact that making a donation can have on others.

"If you can leave the legacy of giving someone a life back who otherwise would have lost their's then regardless of anything else, that will have been a life well lived."

On this year's organ donor awareness poster 42 grateful transplant recipients' photos feature including that of Rose Dalton, a kidney transplant recipient from Cavan and Monaghan natives, Thomas Flannery (a lung transplant recipient), Jason McKenna (kidney), Kevin Hickey (heart).

Organ Donor Awareness Week takes place from 23- 30 April