Michelle Miller and her brother, Jordan, found the strength to demonstrate compassion and generosity when a tragic accident took their sister’s life. Amid shock and grief, they chose to donate her organs, and saved four strangers’ lives.

“Brandy was a kind and giving person. Donating her organs was the right thing to do,” said Michelle. “Culturally, death is not planned and it’s not a conversation we have with one another. We saw it as a way for our sister to live on.”

Brandy Miller died in 2022.

Their cousin Aireanna Small, RN, cares for patients hospitalized for liver transplantation at UR Medicine’s Strong Memorial Hospital. She has witnessed the power of organ donation, and the challenges patients experience while waiting.

“Patients can wait a long time for a match to be found, and unfortunately some of them run out of time,” Small said. “Donating Brandy’s organs helped make something good happen from an awful situation.”

Organ donation is the foundation for organ transplantation. But the chances of finding a suitable match are not evenly distributed across all ethnic groups. Certain genetic markers and blood types, which play a crucial role in matching donors and recipients, are more common in specific ethnic populations.

For instance, patients from Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American communities often wait longer for organ transplants due to a lack of suitable matches from their own communities.

Multicultural organ donation is vital because it increases the diversity of the donor pool and improves the chances of finding compatible matches for patients from various ethnic backgrounds. A diverse donor pool ensures that more lives can be saved across all communities, reducing the disparities in transplant success rates among ethnic groups.

“Some of our sickest padifferent tients are added to organ transplant wait lists every day. Increased participation in organ donation can improve

their chances of finding a life-saving match,” said Roberto Hernandez-Alejandro, MD, chief of UR Medicine’s Transplant Institute.

Months later, the Millers received emotional letters of gratitude from recipients, including the woman who received her heart.

“It filled our hearts and reminded us that we did the right thing,” said Miller, who enrolled in the Gift of Life registry.

There are more than 100,000 people who need a life-saving organ transplant in the country. That includes more than 500 people waiting for a new heart, kidney, liver, or pancreas transplant at UR Medicine’s Strong Memorial Hospital, Upstate New York’s leading transplant center. A donor can save as many as eight lives.

Finger Lakes Donor Recovery Network, which is a program of URMC, coordinates organ and tissue donation, and works with 37 community hospitals in the Finger Lakes, Central, and Northern New York regions.
 

• online at passlifeon.org;

• at the Department of Motor Vehicles;

• when applying for health care benefits through the New York Health Exchange;

• when registering to vote; 

• through UR Medicine’s MyChart patient portal or

• consider living donation, which is an option for kidney and liver transplantation. Family members may be close matches for patients and choose to donate. Other times altruistic donors come to the aid of a stranger who is a match. Learn more here.