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October 15, 2008

Community gathers for prayer breakfast

James Coburn

EDMOND — Being an organ donor is the greatest Christ-like gift one can give, Carl Reherman said.

Edmond’s former mayor said he was without fear in 2007 when being wheeled down a long corridor for a liver transplant at the Integris Baptist Medical Center’s Nazih Zuhdi Transplant Institute.

“I was at peace,” he told a capacity crowd Wednesday morning at the annual Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast. “It was one of the strangest feelings I ever had. I knew the Lord would guide Dr. Ghuloom’s hands and his scalpel.”

His wife Gloria, their family and friends prayed for a miracle. The miracle for Reherman was having the strength to accept whatever God had planned for him, Reherman said.

Reherman calls it “divine intervention” that he is alive today. A sequence of events galvanized his faith.

He was in Kansas City visiting his sister in 2006. The next morning, he quickly became disoriented and faded into a coma. He was rushed to Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City where his coma persisted for four days. Physicians told Reherman he eventually would need a liver transplant to survive.

“They say that faith can move a mountain,” Reherman said. “I’m here to tell you that faith in God, the kind of faith that burns inside you, will give you power to climb that mountain.”

Reherman hopes prospective donors will tell their families about their decision to save lives by becoming organ donors when they die.

Reherman’s liver donor was a 42-year-old Chandler woman. He had met Cindy Smith while worshiping at his hometown church. Smith was at church the Sunday when Reherman spoke to the congregation about the need for organ donors.

She chose to give the gift of life. The mother designated herself as an organ donor through the LifeSharers organ donors network only two months before dying unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm. Her family was able to see that Reherman was the liver recipient.

After the transplant, Reherman learned that his liver biopsy revealed he would otherwise have had three months to live without the surgery.

“She died for me. She died for those other people who received her organs,” Reherman said. “There’s no Christian love greater than when at the time of your death, you reach out, tell someone else, tell a stranger or your best friend, ‘You need me. I’m going to give you my organ.’”

A new name is added every 16 minutes to the national organ transplant waiting list, according to the American Heart Association. So Reherman urged the Prayer Breakfast audience to consider becoming organ donors.

Edmond’s first Mayor’s Prayer breakfast was in 1978 after a request to then-Mayor Reherman by Jerry Brown and others to bridge a need in the community. Reherman was mayor of Edmond from 1978-88. The importance of the Mayor’s Prayer breakfast is that it joins the community by faith, Mayor Dan O’Neil said.

“If we can pray together, then we can work together,” O’Neil said.



SEE www.lifesharers.org for more information about the LifeSharers organ donation network.

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