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October 1, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: A decision made in 1994 is still saving lives today

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Fifteen years ago I read a newspaper story that altered the direction of my life a few degrees. By my most conservative calculations, that alteration has saved the lives of about a dozen people and restored the sight of four more.

Multiply my numbers by tens of thousands and you can glean a very low estimate of the power of “The Nicholas Effect.”

On Oct. 1, 1994, 7-year-old Nicholas Green of the United States died in an Italian hospital as a result of a bullet wound. Two days before, he had been on vacation with his family, asleep in the back seat of a rental car on a dark stretch of highway in southern Italy, when two men in another car attacked. Probably the men mistook the Greens’ car for that of a jewel courier.

Nicholas’ mom, Maggie, his dad, Reg, and his 4-year-old sister, Eleanor, were unharmed, but a single bullet pierced Nicholas’ brain, and he never regained consciousness. In their stunned grief, his parents made a personal decision that would alter their family’s lives — and the lives of untold numbers of other families — by much more than a few degrees.

They donated Nicholas’ organs.

Within 24 hours of that choice, the Italian news media had spread the story of Nicholas Green throughout their nation and the rest of Europe. In only a few more hours, the story rapidly moved to North America, South America, across the Pacific to Asia, Australia and New Zealand and into corners of Africa and the former Soviet Union.

People on every continent identified with the American family who had suffered such a tragedy so far from home. And they wondered if they could make such an unselfish, life-giving decision under the same circumstances.

In Italy, where the organ donation rate was one of the worst in Europe, a period of shame and soul-searching was followed by a national transformation. Today, Italians have quadrupled their rate of donation, the highest growth in the E.U. Cutting-edge transplant technology is developed and conducted in Italy. The Italian parliament passed sweeping legislation that helped make organ donation one of the first options for donor families, not one of the slim possibilities almost no one mentions until it’s too late.

This turnaround in Italy, and the rippling out to other nations, including ours, is part of what is known in the organ donation field as “The Nicholas Effect.” So, too, are the schools, scholarships, clinics, parks, sculptures, plaques and at least one bridge — in Genoa — that bear the name of Nicholas Green.

With a foundation, educational videos and two books written by Reg Green — and published by the Bloomington company, AuthorHouse — the Greens have nourished The Nicholas Effect and kept it vital and growing. A CBS television movie of their story, “Nicholas’ Gift,” which starred Jamie Lee Curtis and the late Alan Bates, has been viewed by nearly 100 million people.

Reg Green, now 80, still travels the USA and the globe, accepting invitations from large organizations and small ones to help raise awareness for organ donation.

Nicholas would have been 22 on Sept. 9. His younger sister, Eleanor, is now a college student, a young woman who is in Italy this week to be a part of 15th anniversary commemorations of her brother’s death and his gift of life to others.

On an Italian television program Tuesday, Eleanor was interviewed along with one of the seven recipients of her brother’s organs, corneas and tissue. Only 19 in ’94, Maria Pia Pedala was comatose and near death when a transplant team replaced her diseased liver with Nicholas’ perfect, healthy boy’s liver. Pedala healed, thrived, married and is now the mother of two children, one of whom she named “Nicholas.”

According to an e-mail from Andrea Scarabelli, a friend of the Greens since Nicholas’ death, Eleanor and Maria Pia held hands throughout the TV interview.

A little more than 10 years ago, I met Scarabelli when I went to Italy to write about the filming of “Nicholas’ Gift.” Long and lean, he was in his early 20s and devoted to the family he had come to know only because he’d sent a heartfelt condolence letter after their loss. Just recently, he completed the Italian translation of Reg Green’s book, “The Gift That Heals.” (AuthorHouse also published the Italian version.)

Like Scarabelli, I’d known nothing about the Greens before Oct. 1, 1994. My condolence letter to them was in the form of a column I wrote for the San Francisco Examiner. In the ensuing 15 years, we became friends; I was privileged when they were babies to hold their now 13-year-old twins, Martin and Laura, in my arms. I’ve also joined the Greens’ organ donation advocacy.

My limited work (compared to theirs) has included not only published advocacy but personal lobbying of friends and relatives to take inspiration from the Greens and commit to organ donation if the unwanted opportunity ever comes to pass. Two families I know of did make that decision because I had told them the story of Nicholas Green. That is how I know about the lives saved and the sight restored.

People continually tell Reg and Maggie Green that their decision 15 years ago prompted similar decisions and saved more lives. But none of us will ever know how many hearts beat in different bodies because of the Greens’ sustained example, how many livers, kidneys and lungs function, how many diabetics have been cured by donated islet cells, or how many repaired eyes behold again the faces of loved ones.

The numbers don’t matter.

Speaking of his first book, “The Nicholas Effect,” Reg said it records “what, by the world’s standards, is a very small tragedy, one little death 15 years ago in a faraway place that by now should have been forgotten by all but those close to it. Yet the e-mails, energized or tearful, that come to us in a steady stream are a constant reminder that Nicholas’ story is still, in some way, affecting how people who never had any connection to him or us, see life.”



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com



You can help

• More than 100,000 people in the United States are on the waiting list for an organ or tissue transplant. To learn more about becoming a declared donor in Indiana, contact IOPO, the Indiana Organ Procurement Organization at donatelifeindiana.org or 702 Rotary Circle, Indianapolis 46202.

• The Nicholas Green Foundation is a nonprofit, private organization that can be reached at nicholasgreen.org or 5701 Alder Ridge Dr., La Canada, CA. 91011 or (818) 952-2095.

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