A California couple celebrates the greatest gift imaginable Christmas – a healthy baby, thanks to the kindness of an organ donor who lives thousands of miles away.
Young parents Chad and Aileen Cooper met face-to-face with Michael Speck via Zoom, CB Martinez News reports in their first emotional encounter with unknown unknown.
“There are no words that can describe the gratitude we have for you Michael, that you saved our son’s life,” Aileen Cooper said in the video call.
“It’s an honor of mine,” Speck told him.
Speck had given part of the liver to ten-month-old Jacob Cooper. Jacob was born with biliary atresia, a rare disease of the liver and bile ducts that can be fatal.
“Your child is born with a problem and then someone from all over the country shows up who you’ve never met to save his life,” Father Chad Cooper said.
Dr. Yuri Genyk, who works at the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, where Jacob was operated on, said the baby needed a liver transplant to survive.
“He was getting sicker and sicker,” Genyk said. “He was hospitalized with infection before the transplant. He was critically ill.”
Jacob’s father immediately offered to be a donor, but tests revealed a diagnosis of his own.
“On computed tomography and MRI we found a mass near the pelvis, and this should be seen immediately,” he recalled the doctors told him.
With Chad and Aileen Cooper both inadequate donors, doctors began looking for another living donor, which they found weeks later, nearly 2,000 miles away. Ohio.
The donor was Michael Speck, 64.
Speck is a father and grandfather, and was already an organ donor, as he had donated a kidney to a minister years before.
“The surgeon told me he was a ten-month-old baby,” Speck said. “When I found out, I burst into tears.”
In October, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Speck traveled to Los Angeles for the transplant. It was a great success.
Speck now expects others to follow suit.
“There are so many people who can do the same as me,” he said.
Speaking to Chad and Aileen Cooper about Zoom, Speck said, “Being able to give a child … is a miracle.”
Aileen and Chad told Speck that he was the miracle.
“It’s all worth seeing guys,” he replied.
And in November, Jacob’s father, Chad Cooper, was operated on to remove the mass, a benign tumor. Both he and his son are doing well.