I
Things can change any second, like really any second of your life.
So every single day that I'm here is awesome.
I'm not in the hospital bed anymore thinking like I hope
I'm alive tomorrow at 10:00 AM.
I hope I'm alive tomorrow at 10:00 AM, which was the worst thing
a 30 year old could go through.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles and I started volunteering in an emergency
department when I was a teenager.
And instead of leaving to go home at like 10:00 PM, I was there till like midnight.
My parents were mad at me and they said, why did you stay late?
And I said, I think I found out what I want to do with my life.
I want to be a doctor.
So I tell people when I'm trying to explain to them, I'm like I
was at like the peak of my life.
I remember even thinking that everything was going too well.
I had just matched into this critical care program in New York city.
I was 30 years old.
The only thing that was wrong was this cough that wasn't going away.
You know, I'll do my shift and then we'll kind of see where the day takes me.
So.
I was working and one of my attendings had noticed that, she
said, you know, you're stopping in between sentences to take a breath.
And she told me to go down to the ER to get, uh, a chest x-ray done.
I got the chest x-ray done.
And, um, I came back to the room and they're like, it looks really weird.
The supervising physician said I want to keep you in the hospital.
My stubborn self said, I don't want to be in the hospital.
I have work tomorrow.
And they said, you're going to stay in the hospital.
And we don't care.
This is the best thing that happened to me because if I had stayed home, I would
have just gone into cardiac arrest at home and I would have just died in bed in my sleep.
Last thing that I heard right before I just kinda, you know, dozed off
into limbo was, uh, should we turn this into a code blue, which is
basically like, okay, she's dying.
Should we just, should we just, you know, turn this into a code blue she's dying.
And so to hear that was the scariest thing I'd ever heard,
and that's when my heart stopped.
So I ended up having familial dilated cardiomyopathy, which is essentially a
genetic condition that means that your heart muscle is not working that well.
My first symptom and my first sign and the way I found out about this
was basically when it was too late.
When I woke up, I had a tube in my mouth.
I had, you know, tubes coming out of everywhere and that's when everybody was
around me and they were basically like, hey, your heart isn't working anymore.
And I just had to be put on the heart transplant list immediately.
Every night I would go to sleep, hoping that I would wake up
the next day, which is insane.
11 days later, luckily I got the heart transplant and
that's when my life changed.
When I was hospitalised I knew that I wanted to do something.
There was this whole new era of my life that was about to start.
I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew that I was going
to use my physician voice as a platform to talk about organ donation.
If my life was saved by it, there are so many other people's
lives that could be saved by it.
Because it was so important for me to express myself visually as
well, especially with Instagram, Canva ended up being that app that
helped me out with all of that.
It was kind of my outlet for creativity.
So my organ donor had been a girl named Lucy.
She was 23 years old at the time of her death.
Lucy went on to save four lives it wasn't just me.
Through that one tragedy, something beautiful came out of it.
It's kind of the beauty of organ donation and that's what makes it
so important for us to get the word out and how important it is for
people to talk about organ donation.
So one organ donor can save up to eight lives and actually improve the lives
of up to one hundred other people.
You live on through, you know, helping others with that, that
beautiful impact in my opinion.
And, and that's the importance of organ donation.