Monday, April 05, 1999
Gardner's best pitch off the field
Giant promotes organ donation
BY JOHN ERARDI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Mark Gardner won't be over-hyped in today's start. The San Francisco Giants' Opening Day pitcher has experienced what's really important, and it's not likely a baseball game will ever devastate him. Not after the miracle that occurred for his family last year.
His wife, Lori, was diagnosed with liver cancer in September 1997.
“That's the year we (the Giants) went to the playoffs,” Gardner recalls. “I was part of the team, but I wasn't all there mentally. When Lori was first diagnosed, her plea to me was, "Go to the ballpark. Stay with it.' She made every effort to be there. But, down deep inside, we knew this (baseball) was a very small part of our lives.”
The Gardners have two sons, Nicholas, 6, and Daniel, 3.
Lori was put on the list for a liver transplant, but doctors could not tell her if and when a liver would be forthcoming.
Four months later, the miracle occurred.
Lori and a small child, both in the same hospital, both waiting for a liver, were both saved by the same organ: the child got 20 percent of the liver; Lori got the other 80 percent.
The procedure is known as a “split-liver” transplant.
“The doctors did the operation at the same time, Lori in one room, the small child in the other,” Gardner explains. “It was a 14-hour ordeal. The procedure (the split-liver transplant) is not one they'd risk on an older person, a person not as strong or athletic as Lori. She was fortunate in that regard.”
Both of the organ recipients are doing well. Because Lori takes medicine to help her body adjust to the new liver — medicine whose side effect depresses her immune system's ability fight off infection — she has to be especially careful to avoid colds and other illnesses.
“And as long as she takes the medicine, that will be the case,” her husband says. “It could be 10 years; it could be the rest of her life.”
But, Lori is back to being herself. Herself, that is, except for being a newfound convert and a strong proponent for the cause of organ and tissue donation. And Mark is equally outspoken.
He has a pulpit as a major-league pitcher, and he uses it.
“Lori has decided this is what she would do, that she should make people aware (of the tremendous need for more organ and tissue donors),” Gardner says. “We were not aware of how important it is to be an organ and tissue donor. But when it hits home, and you look back on it, and you realize that this one person made a decision that saved two people's lives, it is something very special.”
The number of people around the country on the lists to receive organs and tissue far outnumber people who have informed their spouses and loved ones that in the event of their deaths, they want to be an organ and tissue donor, Gardner says.
If some of these people were to get a look at Lori Gardner — and her two young sons and their father on the mound today, happy and thankful and passionate in the cause — they might decide to become donors, too.
“That's what it's all about,” the Opening Day pitcher says.
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