Heartfelt Help Foundation

Hello, and welcome to the Get to Life Podcast, where we have conversations about organ tissue and ideonation and transplantation. You can always find us guys at thegettidlife.org. I'm Maurice Diehl. I'm Joey Bujreau.

And I am Lisa Laurent West, licensed clinical social worker. Coming up here, on the Get to Life Podcast today. We'll be talking to one heart transplant recipient and hearing how she's paying it forward through a foundation to help other post-transplant recipients. And in the mental health section, we're going to talk about what is doom scrolling and how it can impact your mental health.

All that and more right here on the Get to Life Podcast. Thanks for listening, guys. Thegettidlife.org. Hang on.

And here on the Get to Life Podcast, we want to introduce you to our newest friend, Denise Rediger. How are you? Well, thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Denise is a heart transplant recipient. She's doing great things to pay it forward. And she listens to the Get to Life podcast. We love it.

We love it. We love that. We love that you reached out to connect so that we can help tell your story. And that's what the podcast is all about connecting with folks from across the world to help have that donation conversation.

So where are you located, ma'am? I am located in Northern California, just north of San Francisco. Nice. And so heart transplant recipient.

Take us down that road. And I was diagnosed with postpartum cardiomyopathy when I was 29 years old. So I lived with heart disease most of my life and arguments could be made that I actually lived with heart disease my entire life because everyone on my father's side of the family died of, died early heart disease in some way, shape or form. Except mine just wasn't caught because back then nobody tested you.

I never had an echo. I never had an AKG until I was delivering my son. So it never, there was never an opportunity for me to know what was going on and know that there was a congenital issue. So the diagnosis at 29 came as kind of a shock but I did what all good new moms do and pushed my own stuff aside and had my mom time and didn't really pay much attention to me.

I think a lot of women do exactly that. They do what's right in front of them and take care of the family and they kind of push their own health issues to the side a lot of times to our own detriment. And I was able to live in denial until I wasn't. And that wasn't resulted in implanted pacemakers and defibrillators over the years and then I go back to living in denial until one day in December of 2017 my cardiologist said, you have a year left.

And I then was like, oh, oh, transplant isn't going to happen to somebody else. It's going to happen to me or I'm not going to be here. And I didn't have a whole lot of time to process that because that conversation happened in December of 2017. And in January of 2018, first part right after the first of the year I had a ventricular attack, a cardiac episode, basically a heart attack that landed me in the ER and then they transferred me to Stanford and told me I was too sick to go home and I would be moving into the hospital until I received my transplant.

Oh, wow. I'd have to be. I can't even imagine that you're going through some of the best moments emotionally, mentally in your life, you know, with having a child and then and then all of a sudden going from that high to the fact that your child may not have a mom. I can't imagine what was going through your mind at that point.

My mind's racing for you. Yeah. It was a lot to take in. But when I tell you that I'm really good at denial, I'm really, really good at denial.

It's one of the strongest, yeah, denial. There's so many people in trouble. Yeah. Well, I just, I love you Newton John just passed away recently and one of her critical interviews about how she dealt with her cancer.

I really resonated with because she said sometimes denial is the healthiest place to be. And I thought, yep, that's where I that's where I spent most of my time because sitting and dwelling on it and stewing about it isn't going to change your reality. Right. Right.

You have your life and do the best you can do. Be a good patient, of course, all the time, but the more you sit and dwell in that negative space of what is and what could and maybe the less life you actually are getting to live. But I mean, just you telling me that like you made me okay with everything. Like that too.

We have talked about this on the podcast before and how you face traumatic experiences and things like that. But I mean, you're so upbeat as you're telling your own story. Like that's got to help you. It is a very fine line of accepting your illness and taking care of yourself and doing what need to do, but not letting it be your total everything.

You guide. Yes. Denial can't live in a place where you're a terrible patient, where you don't take care of yourself. Be a good patient, but there's zero point in dwelling and stewing and playing the what if game.

And my mother used to say, getting on the what if bus. You need to get off the what if bus. Denial can only take you so far. And so take us back to that time.

You mentioned, you know, you denied, you get all this, the pacemaker and all these things, and then you go into the Vtak and then get admitted to Stanford and your realization that, you know, what was a year is now maybe a month. So take us through that. And through that the time that you received the phone call, that you may have that second chance. Well, it actually wasn't a phone call because I was living in the hospital at that point in time.

And my gift from God, I 100% believe was he didn't give me a whole lot of time to process because if I'm left to my own devices, I can spiral, which is why I choose not to most of the time. But living in the hospital, I didn't have the distractions of day to day of getting laundry done or doing that to doing that. It was medical stuff directed at me pretty much 24 seven. I didn't have a whole lot of time to process.

I moved into the hospital on January 6th. And on January 29th, a surgeon walked into my hospital room at 1130 p.m. Funny how you remember dates and times of some things and said, we have an offer for you. And I looked at him and said, are you buying a house?

Why are you? What is this mean? I don't know what this means. And he said, he's a no, I think we have the perfect heart for you.

We're running tests and everything, but he said, I think I think this is the heart for you. And he explained that it was a high risk heart and explained what that meant. And it didn't seem like an important enough reason to say no. And if he thought it was perfect, I was willing to say yes.

And at 830 p.m. on January 30th of 2018, I was rolled into the surgical suite and two open heart surgeries later at 8 a.m. the next day, I was rolled out with a new heart. Wow.

It's funny you mentioned, you know, you talk about that, I guess, shark dilemma that you had when he tells you that he has your life-saving organ there. And then also tells you that it's high risk. And I've been in my role and I've been with LOPA for over 20 years. And one of the biggest things when people ask me, if I ever need a transplant, will you help me?

I'm like, well, there's only so much I can do because I can't move anyone up and down the list. But what I can do is tell you, say yes to a high risk organ. And what we're talking about here, it's not high risk for failure. It's just high risk for having one of the infectious diseases, like hepatitis B, hepatitis C, HIV.

And as we've talked about in previous episodes, all of these things are very treatable. You can have hepatitis C, especially over the last few years, is completely treatable as far as they can give you a medicine over a six-week or eight-week span, and it no longer exists. It kills the virus in your body. And in HIV, we all know the poster child there of HIV, the person that come to face of HIV, at least for me as a sports fan, Magic Johnson, found out in 1992, that's 30 years ago.

So your face with a question, would you accept it? That had to be a quick and easy yes. And most of the time, these are the best, most ideal organs otherwise. So you probably received one of the healthiest hearts you could have probably gotten.

Now, Joey, let's clarify a little bit that HIV organs will go to HIV recipients. Just to clarify. Just to clarify, it's the... So we do test, just at their higher risk.

But we still test, and you still know what the infectious, if there is one, what it is. And our test now close that window down to one week. So you would only have, and I think... I hate to quote, but our infectious disease doctor, I want to say it's something like 1 in 10,000 of one of those slipping through the cracks.

1 in 10,000. It's something in that ballpark. And basically, his comparison is, you have a better chance of getting into a freeway and getting hit by a car on foot right now than you do of contracting a disease like that that we didn't know about. So tell us a little bit about post, so you get this new chance.

How was that the immediate aftermath and then afterwards? Well, my post-transplant story becomes a little more complicated. I ended up having three open heart surgeries in a span of a week. I had two different separate open heart surgeries at the night of my transplants.

And then I had a third a week later because I just kept eating internally. So everything got pushed back. I had both types of organ rejection and an infection. I spent a little over three months in and out of the hospital post-transplant.

I came home with a wound back. Finally, when I was discharged from home, I didn't make it back to my actual home until April. How far from your home was your transplant center? Two and a half hours.

I was there yesterday. Two and a half hours with traffic. And it's over a bridge in Northern California. We have the complication where you have to be within a short radius of your hospital, but they also require that you not go over a bridge.

So our transplant hospitals are either in San Francisco or in Palo Alto, which is near where the Apple headquarters are. That kind of thing, both are peninsulas. Why not over a bridge? What's the issue?

You have these little things called earthquakes, everyone's going to go out. Oh, yeah. That's true. You guys are talking hurricanes.

And the last big one took out a bridge. So they would prefer that their transplant patients not be over a bridge. Okay. Makes sense.

So rough couple months. But now you sound. It was a rough couple months by the time when recovery began, finally, for me, which was probably, I would guess, all of the things got resolved by about July of 2018. And they'll tell you, anybody going through the transplant process, everybody tells you the first year is the hardest.

And nobody lies about that. The first year is the hardest. It is absolutely the hardest. Everyone's the one you're running into somebody was like, I was running Mirathons three months out.

And God bless them. I got the different stories. Yeah. But when recovery started to begin for me, it was like a whole newly summoned, I didn't know what I didn't know.

I thought I was pretty healthy post transfer or pre-transplant because that was my normal. That was my base was having to stop halfway up a flight of stairs to catch my breath wasn't normal for me. I didn't know anything else. I didn't realize there was anything else out there.

And then all of a sudden I was able to do everything I thought about and do the hiking that I had always dreamed of doing. I ran a 5k. I did a 10k after that. It was like this whole new world of activity opened up to me that was nothing short of miraculous.

So Denise, having lived two hours from your transplant center, where did you stay? I know before you were in the hospital, but when you got out of the hospital, were you able to go back home or did you have to stay closer? So no appointments are very frequently early on. We had to stay.

I was in and out of the hospital, so I'd be discharged to go to post-transplant housing for a week or so, sometimes maybe even two weeks at a time. And then something would happen with my labs and I'd get readmitted. So I was in and out a lot. So what's post-transplant housing?

At the time, the only thing we were handed was a severely out of date list of hotels that agreed to lower rates for transplant patients. That was the only thing that was available to us. This was four and a half years ago. And it was severely out of date.

Management had changed. Sometimes the partnership agreements had gone out of date with the hospital. And we were left largely to our own devices to figure it out. I have vivid memories of my husband sitting with his phone and his laptop, searching craigslist, searching Facebook marketplace, searching different places for like a short-term apartment that might be suitable, calling hotels.

And this time, that would have been better spent focused on recovery and healing. He spent sitting by my hospital bed, researching housing options. And that was kind of the birth, the seed, the germination of an idea that this part of the system needs to change. I didn't know what to do with that at the time, because I was too sick and he was too busy.

But we ended up finding a lovely woman who has actually since partnered with us, who has an apartment that is a couple of blocks from the hospital. And she gave us a great rate and allowed us, it still was expensive. It cost us almost $5,000 to stay for the period of time that we had to stay post-transplant. But in Northern California, that's kind of a bargain.

And we were able to stay a couple blocks from the hospital in her apartment. And it was a two-bedroom, two-bedroom apartment. It wasn't anything fancy, but it was perfect location and perfect for our needs and allowed me to feel like I was beginning my recovery in a place that felt like home to me. I love that.

And is that where Heartfelt Health Foundation was born? That's where the germination of the idea started. But it really didn't germinate, I guess, until the idea didn't germinate. Until I went back for my yearly checkup and popped my head into the social workers office at my clinic because she was retiring.

And I wanted to say thank you for all that you've done for me and say wish her well in her next part of her adventure. And came in on a conversation that I probably shouldn't have overheard. But it was about a patient who was at risk of being pushed down the transplant list because he had no funding whatsoever to pay for post-transplant housing. And I was like, this is stupid.

I think I said it out loud, this is stupid. Nothing is stupid is money. Nothing is solvable is money. Should stop someone from getting your transplant.

I'm going home and doing something about it. And with about two weeks notice and with wildfires burning, that's the glory of Northern California. We have wildfires burning all around us. I threw a fundraiser in my backyard and we raised $12,000 under the hospitals 501c3.

And we paid for housing for that patient. I found out afterwards was a widow with three little kids and was the soul breadwinner for his family and when he went into heart failure and got listed for transplant, he couldn't work anymore. So they were surviving on disability. I'm glad you overheard that conversation.

I shouldn't have overheard that. It's very direct that your fundraisers save that person's life. If they move a patient down, it's not like they automatically can move them easily. They won't easily just move them back up.

And so they make all the other like the medical, the mental, the physical, everything else, all the other places the checks or checked off the boxes were checked, except for the housing. And here you are. And you save the day, basically, by the fundraiser, by providing housing, that's unbelievable. So that happened toward the end of 2019.

And I sat down with my family over the holidays and said, I think this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I think we need to start a family foundation. I hate that this is an issue for transplant patients. I hate that this housing issue is an issue for transplant patients.

And I wanted you to solve it. I don't know what I can do at this point, but I want to do something. So we all agreed as a family and we filed the paperwork at the beginning of 2020 for Heartfelt Health Foundation. And then the world shut down and I thought, well, I was going to say got better things to do than process a little 501c3 application, right?

Yeah. And sure enough, by about August of 2020, August, September of 2020, we got our 501c3 paperwork in the mail, which shocked me because I figured that they would not be working on those kind of things. It was important. And as soon as we got it, we hit the ground running.

And we've helped been able to help 25 patients now with their post-transplant housing. That's amazing. That's amazing. And we learned that there's so much more to it.

When we were doing our due diligence to research like the needs of this, we learned from parents of pediatric transplant patients that they were choosing to live in their car, rather than go during the pandemic to the Ronald McDonald House, because at least there, the houses were shut down because of COVID policies. And B, if they were letting anybody in, it was one parent going in with a child and then the other parent couldn't see them. They couldn't see their siblings. That's not conducive for scientifically.

We know it's not conducive for recovery for families to be separated, to be pulled apart at the time where they need to be coming together. So it just started just reinforcing. This deed is ever-present and it needs to be done very specifically. And if COVID taught of anything, it's we now know the word bubble.

And we know that your bubble is critical for your social health, for your mental health, and for recovery in these critical times. So Denise, how is your model different than a transplant house? Transplant houses, which are phenomenal. I love them.

And we don't have them here. Stanford has a transplant house, but it's very limited in who they can serve. And most people are not able, well, I used to say about 50% of the people aren't able to go there afterwards, because it doesn't work for their family in one way, shape or another, because of the rules surrounding it. So, therefore, you're adding risk on where risk doesn't need to be there.

Now, I am completely resonating with the argument that sometimes that risk is worth it, because you're building community and you're getting to talk to people who are in similar situations as you are. My argument back to that is that I think, especially during the first couple of months, your immunosuppression is serious enough that we can build community in other ways. So we partner, our model is that we partner with short term apartments, like the one I stayed in, and suite-style hotels so that families can recover in places that feel like home altogether. As an example, we just sent home a six-year-old little boy who received his heart transplant a few months ago.

And that family, because of obviously a congenital heart defect, that family is extraordinarily close. And they qualified for one on the gun house, but they really didn't want to stay there. Because if mom had gone in with a sweet little boy, dad and sibling could not have seen them, grandma couldn't have seen them, until they came out. There was no swapping off of care, there was no respite, none of that was able to happen.

So they came to us and we were able to put them into a basically an apartment where they could all be together, the whole family could be together. And his recovery went so well, they actually discharged from home earlier than they had anticipated. And the family will tell you that they think it's because everybody was able to be together. Right, their support system was there.

And I'm sure they will be eternally grateful to you for that as well. How can one support your foundation if they are inclined to do so or participate in this virtual race? Well, last year for our first fundraiser, we did a virtual 5k and we ended up having participants from not only all over the US, but in Canada and parts of Europe, which was amazing to me. Yes.

We actually had a Marine platoon in Japan do the 5k. That's so cool. Which was so much fun to see. They sent photos and if you look at our social media, you'll see it.

We included it in a reel that these guys that were all, they had all their gear on, because of course they can't just do a simple 5k. They have a hundred pounds of gear on them and did the 5k, which was amazing. So it was so much fun to watch. And when we were planning this year, we were thinking about, do we do one in person?

And I thought, why would I say no to these people who supported us last year who are everywhere and resonate with the need of transplant housing? Because that is something anybody with a heart issue of any sort or heart disease in their family, we all can resonate with the need for housing. No matter who you are, you know, and where you are, and housing prices are going up everywhere. We all know how hard it is to get housing.

So we're doing another virtual 5k. It's a 5k your way. If you like to dance, dance your way to a 5k. If you like to hike, hike your way to a 5k.

Get on your Peloton or your knock off version of your Peloton. And join us for a 5k anytime between October 1st and 10th. You can, there are links in our social media account, which we're on social media all the time. There's links on our website to sign up.

You can reach out to us through our website to help or suggest we're looking, always looking for sponsors to help us make housing happen. That's our motto is we want to make housing happen for these patients and in the Bay Area, especially in Silicon Valley where tech travel is back. Housing is quickly approaching even at the negotiated rate of about 350 a night for housing. And I'm sure if someone wants to help your foundation, but is not a 5k or like myself or even like a blocker, do this.

Well, how do you generally move? I'm certain through the office. We might as well see her. Join us.

Kate from the second floor. He took the elevator. I can tell you that everybody moves in some way, shape or form during the day and I'll bet you that throughout the day or a couple of days, everybody can do the equivalent of a 5k. And the best thing is that we partnered with a local amazing artist and she created this logo for that will go on everybody's t-shirt that is a work of art.

I actually want her to give me a digital image of it. That is, you'll have to see it. We're putting it up on our social media today, but it's basically an anatomical heart that is changed into a road and it's meant to reflect the adventure and the journey of transplants. And of course, the bottom part of the heart, the bottom chambers of the heart are turned into great lives because we live in wine country.

Oh yeah, that's true. I love that. Denise, I just need to sit in a room with you and just listen to you talk. Let's have some new ideas.

I love it. I would love that. I would love that. We talk about one person making a difference.

I think we found her guys. This is Denise from Northern California, HeartfeltHelpFoundation.com. I visited there yesterday. I love that the family testimonials.

Those are powerful. I love that your family does this with you and I love that this is your passion and how you honor your donor. I mean, it doesn't get better than that. Absolutely.

And that's the whole point is that I want to be able to look back on this and know that in some way, ship or form, I mean, my donor, I mean, my donor's family proud that this heart that I was gifted didn't just sit on the couch and not try and make a change in our little corner of the world. And I want to make a change in my little corner of the world and make sure that this world of transplants that I never asked for, but find myself a part of. And I'm so grateful to be a part of that. I can change it a little bit for the better.

Well, it sounds like you've changed several families thus far. And again, I'm sure they're going to be eternally grateful for that. So I'm eternally grateful for the opportunity to partner with them. Getting to meet these families has been life-changing to me.

It's been as much a big gift for me as it has been, hopefully, for them. Denise will have an open mic for you anytime you want to head back. We hope that you grow this program. It looks like you have some wonderful people supporting you, including us here at the Gifted Life and keep doing what you do.

We're proud. Thank you so much. Here on the Gifted Life Podcast, we take a moment for mental health. And today, what are we talking about, Joe?

Well, I'm really interested to hear about something I've never heard of before. Doom scrolling. First of all, what is it, Lisa? Well, I was going to throw that out to you and Laurie, Joey, to see what do you think that is?

Doom, like Doom, D-O-O-M scrolling. What comes to mind? So scrolling social media. Yeah.

And looking forward to that. Yeah, the bad stuff. So it's a phenomena, apparently, and it can actually impact our mental health in not in that way. I truly believe that, yes.

It is described as a ceaseless compulsion to keep refreshing and devouring all those unsavory news stories. So is it like just tragedies, or is it like you trying to look at things that, hoping that other friends or something on Facebook might have bad situations, divorce? What are we talking about? Well, without realizing we're doing it.

We don't realize we do it. But it's been linked to experiences of depression and poor health. And there's also mountains of evidence to support the idea that long-term stress negatively affects physical and mental well-being. All right.

This is a true story on Facebook. I know there was one of our friends who said that her doctor, her physical doctor, said that she had to step away from Facebook like she made a post, and she said because this is becoming overwhelming. And the negativity is impacting my health. It's impacting me physically.

Good for that doctor for recognizing that. Yeah. But I thought that was interesting. I was like, oh, a medical doctor is saying, please stop looking at this stuff.

Because you see friends going down a rabbit hole sometime. Like you can tell when somebody's kind of in a rut. Yeah. Well, to an obsessive point too.

And it makes you feel more and more anxious. It's when you go to these websites and they make you feel anxious. But then you get hooked and you want to read more to see what happens next. And it's a quest to find as much disheartening information as possible.

And so one of the things over the last couple of years, there's just been tons of it, right? You almost can't get away from it. And so we catch ourselves that's all we're doing. The climate, the COVID pandemic, the highly visible police brutality, the increased political polarization, all of that is at our fingertips.

And we can recycle it and recycle it and recycle it. And it really is not a very good thing for us. According to a doctor, Ken Gager, a psychiatrist at Ohio State University's Medical Center, it really comes from an evolutionary process that it once helped us. So if you think back in the days way back in the days, thousands of years ago, the need to anticipate negative things was a necessity, right?

You needed to know when the tiger was going to come to get you or I'm talking about like years ago, before really anything we understand as current civilization, that had to observe and anticipate warmfully events. So it's really wired into our brain. But because modern day technology and with social media, there's so much of it and it's there. And so we tend to, we tend to get pulled to that and then more pulled and more pulled and it really becomes a terrible cycle.

And we honestly, in where social media should be, I mean, social media is media that's supposed to bring us more social activity. But it can really make people start feeling alone and isolated. So it's not a good thing. I would actually even add to that.

It's a conversation I've had a discussion, disagreement with some of my friends about mainstream media too. I mean, it's not just social media. You flip on mainstream media and if I watch the five to five 30 or five 30, whatever, five 30 to six and then basically from five to six 30, I have to wait until the last three minutes of the episode of the show to actually catch a heartfelt story that's positive because it feels like, and I know Laurie, that's your old stomping ground. But what you have to agree.

For news, but yeah, but 24 hour news cycles really. Everything is this is negative, this is negative, this is like, all right, this is how these people respond negatively to it. And I've actually taken myself, like your friend, away from the mainstream media too. Like I've had to barely get on Facebook and I barely watch mainstream media for that.

I feel much stress level rising. And with stress level rising brings high blood pressure and all kind of heart issues and everything else negative basically that happens with your body physics. And some of the stuff is showing so like a sad story comes up, something that's tragic, you know, where community used to grieve that. Well, we don't have time to grieve.

Like, okay, here, this family was in this accident and three people passed away. And we don't have time to grieve that because before you can blink your eye, there's another sad story or another tragic story. And we're not able to fully process one before there's another one that hits us. So it really, it can really affect us negatively in our mindset.

And according to the Cleveland clinic, doom scrolling can reinforce negative thoughts and negative mindset, which then is going to equal not great mental health. So how can we stop ourselves? Because we do use social media, we do use the news, like you said, at the end of the news, there's always maybe a good story. And you know, in social media, you know, we have Facebook pages where we communicate with our donor families, where we communicate with our with our employees.

And so there are benefits to that. So how can you keep those things, but not let them become your check? Yes. Yeah, I went to a Facebook seminar, which was fabulous to see actual people who were behind this.

They're young, obviously bright professionals, but they said it becomes overwhelming for us. So they set these alarms. And I don't know if this is going to go with what you're talking about, but they said, so I have to be on there for work, but I'm going to set an alarm and do it for this long, then I have to go do something else. I'm like, away from technology, take a walk outside, go do some call of friend or do something different, because it becomes your whole being.

Right. Yeah. Well, you know, first off, you have to recognize it as a habit of yours. So you can't do anything to ever correct anything that's a poor habit.

If you don't understand it, recognize it as a poor habit. So we have it. We can have it hardly. So it's hard for me to break a habit.

We sure it is. Man, if habits were easy to break, we'd all be in perfectly good middle and physical health. But so you just have to recognize it. And it's not something that's going to happen overnight and limit your screen time.

So yeah, if you have to set an alarm, that's a great idea. Set an alarm. You know, I get a weekly screen report on my phone. I don't I guess I have it set to come up every Sunday at a certain time in the morning.

It comes up and it says how many hours I've been on my screen. So look at that and start limiting that lock down your phone. And then also enjoy activities that keep you more where again. We talk almost every time I talk about exercise and socializing.

And yet we need to stop and smell the roses. You know, there are thorns. We can't avoid it. There are thorns in life.

But man, on top of those thorns are beautiful roses that are beautiful. They smell good. And so we have to take moments to just smell the roses. So that's what doomscrolling is.

That's kind of it in a nutshell. We learned to be worried. I've never heard of it. I'm, you know, researching topics for the podcast.

I'm like, doomscrolling. Oh, I think that'll be a good one. That is a good one. The first thing I want to do is ask Lori and Joey if they know what doomscrolling was.

I mean, we're kind of we're kind of like we were guessing context clues. Yeah. That's interesting. That's interesting.

And says that's an interesting topic. Look, check your screen times time yourself. Make sure you're looking for good, happy things in addition to the desire to keep up with the bad things are happening and sad things. Keep it in check.

It's a good thing. Everything in moderation. That's right. All right.

Maybe you have a topic you'd like for us to cover here on the gifted life. All you have to do is email us info at the gifted life dot org. In our question and answer segment today, do I need to put my wish to donate in my will so my family knows that I want to be a donor. I'm going to kick that to you, Joe.

But oh, I hope you tell your family you also want to be a donor, right? Yeah. I mean, the key is to let them know. The answer to this is no, you don't need to put it in your will.

Now some some people do have it in their will and it's important when we do find it, but unfortunately that's not something we can easily search. Oftentimes the will is not not even looked at until later. So so far, us, the most important thing is to put it on your license or register and then let your family know about it. Have that conversation with your family so that they are aware so that when we do go through those next steps with them, they've already known because you've had the conversation with them that this is what you want and this is why you want it.

So it makes those next steps much easier. And not only when you register, are you given the gift of life to someone when you tell your family you're given them a gift as well by not having to make that decision potentially one day make that decision. So the gift because people don't like to talk about that. We know that but you think about it as given your family a gift by sharing that decision with them.

All right, you have a question for us. All you have to do is give us a call 5046483477. In every episode of the gift of life, we honor a hero. Today's hero is Carl C.J.

Miller. And we learn about him from his wife. Carl C.J. Miller was truly one of a kind.

He was the life of the party, never met a stranger and lived life to the absolute fullest. He was a voted husband and the best father to his two daughters. He worked hard and gave his family a fairy tale life. He passed away unexpectedly in July of 2021.

Through his death, he was able to help those in need. It gives us so much peace knowing that his death wasn't for nothing. C.J. was the type of person to help anyone in need.

No questions asked. So when I, his wife was contacted about his organs, I knew that he'd want nothing more than to help others. His favorite saying was, I'm living the dream. My plea is for everyone to live life the way he did care free and passionately.

So let's pause and say thank you to Carl for the gift of life. All right, guys. Episode 195 of the gift of life is in the books. Thanks for listening.

And remember, you can register as an organ, eye and tissue donor anytime at registerme.org. Also a huge thank you to Denise Redeker, not only for sharing her story, but for starting up the Hartfeld Help Foundation and helping so many others through something that I didn't even realize was a problem. It's funny in the donation transplant world. And she saw that, she overheard it and then turned that into her mission and to help paying it forward for others.

One person making a difference. It's got to love it. The best place to find us guys at our website, the gift of life.org. Tell your friends.

And then listen to us and find links to listen on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you listen to your podcast. And if you listen on Apple Podcast, please give us a five-star rating. It helps others find our podcast. On social media, you can like our page on Facebook, where the gift of life podcast on Twitter and Instagram at giftedlifepod.

Thanks for spending some time with us today. We ask that you go out and do something you wouldn't normally do to help us make life happen for one big team.