Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 8, 1993 TAG: 9312080217
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Overcome by diabetes, Carl Lucas fought to live long enough to receive a simultaneous heart and kidney transplant that saved his life.
Carl and Pam know little about the organ donor, just that he was a 19-year-old man who died in a fall from a second-story window. They have contributed to the Good Neighbors Fund in his memory each year since Carl's transplant.
For the past two years, they have also given in memory of Mitzi Ann Stafford, a Salem girl who died despite a heart transplant. Stafford's death also inspired the Lucases to start Transplants United, a support group dedicated to raising awareness and promoting organ donation.
This year, the Lucases suffered adversity again when Pam was laid off from her job as a computer operator at Gardner-Denver.
Typically, the Lucases survived.
"I never thought of myself as old at 45, until I had to go looking for work," Pam Lucas says. Like her husband, she persevered.
Pam Lucas made the transition from a desk chair to the seat of a tractor-trailer rig.
It's a long story, she says, but "the important thing is we have an income again, and we will be able to continue our gift to the Good Neighbors Fund."
Checks should be made payable to Good Neighbors Fund and mailed to Roanoke Times & World-News, P.O. Box 1951, Roanoke 24008.
Names - but not the amounts of donations - of contributing businesses, individuals or organizations, as well as memorial and honorific designations, will be listed. Those requesting that their names not be used will remain anonymous.
by CNB