Hello and welcome to the gifted life podcast or we have conversations about organ tissue and eye donation and transplantation. You can always find us at thegiftedlife.org. I'm Maurice Deel. I'm Joey Boudreau.
And I'm Nyla Schwab. Coming up on episode 255 of the gifted life. Yeah, we'll be excited to bring you the legacy queen, Miss Louisiana's team, who's using her platform to educate others on donation. And I'm going to be talking about that question of how you doing?
I don't know. And it's in my end years like I don't know. Yeah, exactly. So they do that.
Yeah, lots to dive into there. Hang on to your hats guys. Here we go. Live podcast, y'all.
We know royalty. We have a queen on our team. We love it. Miss Louisiana's team, Virginia Kirkpatrick.
How are you, ma'am? I'm doing great. How are y'all? We are so good.
I love me some of this Virginia. She has a history of donation education in her family. She's joined the Lopa ranks and she just became Miss Louisiana's team. And it was so cool because she has such a kind heart.
She wants to help us save more lives through organ tissue and eye donation education. And I was watching this competition and she worked her way up the ranks and she was in the top five and then she won. And I was like, oh my gosh, Virginia won. How exciting.
So congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, so to get there, you have quite the story and we love it because you have a tie to donation, which is what we want to focus on here now. But you have this unique platform where you reach people that we may have never reached.
And we just appreciate you saying, this is what I want to do in my life. And I think that's so cool. So how's it been going for you on the royalty trail, ma'am? It's been doing great.
It's super exciting. I just won back in late April. So it's still kind of freshly new. But with my community service initiative, which is called Life After Mind, Your Choice, Their Chance, I've really been able to bring it to a new level from becoming a local title holder to now the state title holder, which is still so crazy.
I now have all these connections and I have this platform that I can really promote organ donation and organ donation awareness even more than what I was able to do now all across the state instead of just a bad range. And I love it. And you have a personal tie. I was trying to tell Joey and Nyla about that.
I'd love for you to share with our audience because before even drivers said, like your family knew about donation because you walk the walk. So can you walk us through that? Absolutely. And I think that's the one that was imagined.
He gladly stepped up and because of him, she's still living amazingly today and living life to the fullest and just being able to see that was so cool because at such a young age, I was really able to see how my grandfather, because of the choice he made say to sister's life. And I think that really stuck with me. And I really wanted more people to understand the importance of organ donation and see how much of an impact it can make and really just how say yes to something can save someone's life. It really changes the conversation.
I'm sure when you go to the O and V, so many people don't really have the tie and they ask this question for the first time and it's like, maybe, maybe not. So I encourage people to talk about it. You lived it. So I would assume your answer was a quick and easy yes, right?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. What kind of like when you're out talking about your platform, like do you ever like do you ever have resistance? Do you ever have like challenging questions that you have to answer?
Yeah. So actually I did a little pop up at my school with Loba and we did a little table and it was really great because I was able to educate my peers and get to see my peers point of view. But even after and before people would come up to me and it would really shock me because a lot of people wouldn't understand completely the importance of it and they would almost think of it almost as if you're on the table of life or death that the doctor would choose to not save your life because they saw you're an organ donor and I feel like that's a very common misconception that I've had to educate a lot of my peers on and be like, hey, that is not the taste at all. That is just almost a rumor going around that it's not good and just trying to show them the statistics and really open their eyes to the big impact it can make so they don't resist it.
I hope that when I am talking about working in a nation that anyone, I don't want anyone to feel super persuaded that I'm trying to force my opinion on them but I do want them to understand that it's very important and I am passionate about it and I do want them to understand because I know I understand, I would want to understand. I think the way you just worded that is beautiful that you don't want to persuade them but you're educating them. Yes, ma'am. And that you're open to hearing their point of view because so many times people always want to share just their own knowledge but to hear what holds people back from saying yes allows you that opportunity to share your passion and your education.
Yes, ma'am. That's incredible. And in her education journey and her volunteer journey, we run across these myths, right? And we tell them they're going to do everything they can to save your life and donations and option if that's not possible.
And so we have those conversations but I love watching you on campus because those are your people, right? Yeah, in the long when you're running track when you're trying to buy for that crown and so I love to see your pockets of friends come over and just have those healthy conversations, those positive conversations about donation and maybe you wouldn't have had that had you not been volunteering and working in this direction but I love to see the chat and it looked like they were receptive to learning. Yes ma'am. Absolutely.
I think that I'm very blessed that the school I attend is very much a community. So we're always hearing each other out. We're always for the most part trying to see each other's point of view. So I was really happy to see that even some of the guys in the younger grades below me, they would come up to the table and they'd be like, tell me about this and it really just made my day because I really saw our community come together because they were willing to learn about it.
I knew for a fact that some of them weren't working donors but still they came up and they asked me and they asked me to educate them and that was really just something amazing and hopefully made a big difference on their decision to become an organ donor. So guys we talked about this ripple effect. Hopefully if I come over here and educate that will go back home. That kind of thing.
Well we saw that on campus right? So we're there with Virginia. We have the table up. Mom's there.
Miss Heather got to give her a shout out because she does a lot of work to support her baby and live up. Absolutely. And yeah and then can you can you walk them through who we met on campus that was touched by donation who was part of your campus family. Yes.
That was pretty cool. So it was very neat that one of the ladies working at the more the technical office technical part, administrative part of my school came out to our table while we were there and she let us know that she was actually a recipient of an organ donation and after being on the list for years, I think it was five or seven years. She finally received it and because of that person, she is continuing to live today. She really just shared her story and you could see how much of an impact it made on her.
Just being able to interview her and see how passionate she was and how grateful she was. You could see tears forming in her eyes because she just felt so blessed that she received that organ donation and I think that's really what it's all about. She knows that her life was safe because of it and she just got to share her story which was something really special that we didn't even know was going to happen. And she doesn't normally share her story.
Right. We were on there. We were there for the table. We were talking about donation.
Virginia was going around getting all of her friends to come and chit chat with us and take photos. But she was so happy to do it but she never had the opportunity to talk about it in that way. And so we got to sit down and just learn from her. What was that like for you, Virginia?
Because you know your story but hearing all those other stories and I know you visited with some of our donor families as well when you come out to our volunteer event. So walk us through what that does just for your heart and your advocacy. It makes you feel like your problems in the world are nothing compared to theirs. You know I think that's something so great about organ donation is that no matter how many stories you hear, all that there will be thousands of others that will still impact you and still make you gasp and just feel tons of gratitude and also feel a lot of heartbreak at the same time for those people that have to go through that.
But it was really just amazing being able to hear that story and just realize that there are so many stories out there that a lot of people haven't heard or a lot of people haven't been able to tell. And that's also one of the things I'm trying to accomplish as Miss Louisiana's team and my platform is trying to share as many stories as possible. Talk about, sorry I want to talk about Driver's Ed, can we do that real quick? You might.
So, but she's Miss Louisiana's team so you mind sharing how young you are? Absolutely. So I actually just turned 17 a few days ago. You sound like it would be birthday.
It would be birthday. But later happy birthday. Thank you. You sound more like 21-22.
Thank you. I was just going to do a comparison because you just recently went through Driver's Ed where we hope that you guys will talk about donation. Can you talk about your experience? Yeah.
So when going through Driver's Ed, which for me was only a year and a half, two years ago, they almost gave us a pamphlet real fast. I can't remember exactly. They mentioned organ donation, but it was nothing more than three minutes. And I remember coming in and just almost being in all of the fact that they barely even harped on it at all.
It was almost checking off the box. They didn't really seem like they cared for anyone to be educated about organ donation. And because of that, no one was educated on organ donation. So it really just brought to my attention that that is such an amazing place where we can educate kids on organ donation.
But unfortunately, I don't think we really are in many cases. And I think that's something that's an area that we can really focus on to try and educate kids on organ donation because if we can educate them, they are then once they get to the DMV and when they are asked for the first time, they want to be an organ donor on their permit, they can say yes. Yeah. We want them making educated decisions.
We're working with our partners. And that's one of the areas where we're focused on is those driving schools. So you met Miss Leah. And I want to talk about that interaction as well, but Miss Leah's granddaughter, Allie Wrench is a hero.
So she went through the legislature, which I know, Virginia's been spending some time there as well in talking to lawmakers and our Louisiana governor and all about her platform and donation. And she said, we need to do more about getting this word out. And we want to use the story of these amazing heroes. And so Allie's decision, which she decided that she wanted to save and heal lives if she could, is something that we're trying to push into these drivers education courses.
So we actually went to a conference where all the driving school owners attended. So we were able to shake hands and we're hopefully moving the needle, right? Virginia, that's our goal. And then with a big shiny crown, I didn't get to wear it.
I wanted to. I wanted to. I wanted to. So we have Virginia who was able to address the crowd and just talk about how important it is.
And she had just gone through the class and why it is needed that we have this conversation and that it be in a nice environment where it's not scary, right? I think that meaning her and hearing that story was just amazing. That was one of my first really ever appearances as even a local title holder and being able to partner with Loba, meet Miss Lori and just being able to start that connection was really special and really cool. I think it's so interesting.
Oh, sorry, Joey. I jumped in. I know you want to talk to the queen. I know you're next.
I just think it's amazing that with your platform, you're able to see a gap in your own experience and then tackle that, you know, that education and so thank you for doing that. Of course. And I was going to say, if you if you try to loan her that crown, she will not give it back. I'm going to tell you what you're saying.
I'll talk a little bit. But it is me when you have an influencer like Virginia who comes into her room. She has the crown. People notice her from social media TV.
She's been, you know, doing lots of interviews, lots of social media, which I think she does a great job with that. But people just want to come and talk to her and then she has this impressive vision. And it's not something that she just decided to do. It's something that she's lived with, right?
Yeah. So when it comes to donation in your family, what are those conversations like? Is it just like, hey, we know it works like do it? Or what are those conversations with you and your mom who was a queen, your sister was a queen, grandma was a queen.
Right. I think most of our conversations are really just reflecting on the stories that we were talking about earlier. I think it's kind of common knowledge between me and my family that we also were organization and we're all organ owners. But we understand that some people aren't and they might just not be educated and we understand that other people have their reasons too.
But typically when we're talking about organization and we're having conversations with me and my family, we're really just talking about these stories. These stories of these, what these people have had to go through and the miracles that have happened because we're going to nation because it's truly just amazing and it really just makes a big impact on you and how you view the world and how you view saving lives. This all takes me back to the first kind of tongue and cheek question that I had for you. It was when you do go to the OMB so many times people, they ask a question.
It's a very direct question. Yes or no. And so many people don't have that tie. So many people haven't been educated.
And Ann, people don't always, aren't always forthcoming about being a recipient or a donor family or things like that. So it's so interesting to me hearing your story, hearing everything that you've all the advocacy that you've done. And you guys had someone who was a recipient there that you probably see on a regular basis and you talked about the schoolmates that didn't really understand donation. That's right there, like right beneath our noses so often, but we don't know about it.
And it's such a blessing to hear you, the way you speak about it, the passion you have about donation and the fact that you're bringing awareness to them so that they're not going to be sitting at the OMB without knowing. You've brought it to them. You've educated them and you guys have had those difficult conversations, those huge conversations, some people like you mentioned, that we hear all the time, they're not going to save my life. And the fact that you can address that, you are changing, you are saving lives by doing so and even in the future.
And it's hard to put a quantity on that, but just know that everything you're doing has an impact, has that ripple effect on saving lives. And those people may be continuing to conversation and saving lives. And I think it's incredible how you're bringing more stories into this because we learned, I mean, I've said this, I think on the podcast before, but we learn in stories. Absolutely.
And yes, somebody asks you, you can kind of walk them through your story, just your personal story of donation, but just your life, there's this story to it. So when people, it helps connect them to your platform, to a purpose to continue sharing those stories. And like you said, it sounds like you made this safe space for this woman to share her story. And so all these different stories connect us and that does, it moves us forward with donation and puts a face to the to the active donation.
And I love Virginia that you are learning from our volunteers or families of our heroes. And I love because you know, we hear from our donor families, like I just want to say their name. It's okay if I cry, but I just don't want people to forget, right? And so she she volunteers with Miss Kim Neal, who said, I want to tell you about David John Neal, let me tell you about his recipient.
So mom and Virginia got to hear about David John Neal, and then we met Miss Leah, and she said, tell me about Ali, and I'll get into chills thinking about it because it's a new person that's coming. And they said, I just want to know about your hero. And so I love that that you do that Virginia. And I hope that it's helped you, you know, to build a confidence to talk about this platform that it has.
Absolutely. I think 100% it makes you want to talk about the platform more for these people because they're spreading their story as much as you can. But if you can help them, even in the slightest bit to help share that story, you want to. So I know that we have some volunteer opportunities that are coming up, Virginia.
So I'm going to sign you up, ma'am. I'll get to the crown after all of a sudden. I do have the question about the crown. Is it heavy?
Yeah. If you have a bird hitting the box, I would hear it from her. It's not that heavy. Um, you know, it's definitely not light, but I would say that it takes some good titting.
But once it's on your head, no, you kind of get used to it. Sometimes I don't even realize it's there. Oh, the queen says you get used to it. I bet you have to keep a really good posture.
I don't even know. Because they can get quicker to say easy. So mom, mom was a former queen, her sister is a former queen and the grandma. And so it was so expert, like watching mom put the ground on and it was like the pin here, pin years like, wow, I know, but it's really good.
I do want to mention too, so you're Miss Louise and his team were not stopping there. No, you're continuing to educate folks about organization and you're going for another title. Is that right? I'm going for Miss Mary to see.
This will be in August and early September. So I'm really excited for that. Awesome. So you have a lot of work to do.
You have a lot of traveling to do, but we appreciate you taking Lupa for the ride and that you're saving more lives and talking about these heroes. So we just thank you, Miss Virginia. Well, thank you. And I'm marking my calendar.
Okay. We'll be cheering you on. Thank you. Virginia Kirkpatrick, everyone.
Miss Louisiana's team. You're on the gifted life podcast. We're taking a moment for mental health. Who knows?
Hopefully, Nylon knows. I'm like not. I don't know. What I'm talking about.
You know, I'm sorry, I'm like, hey, Joey, how you doing? I don't know. I'm good. I'm good.
That's what people say. I mean, they just don't really kind of stops and says, oh, man, I'm stressed. Oh, I do that only when I'm talking to you because you get my whole scoop. I love this little phrase and it says, if you can name it, you can tame it.
And so I wonder if you just pause for a minute and just think, okay, what am I feeling today? Overwhelmed. Overwhelmed? Yeah, you know what?
Because if you can say I'm overwhelmed, it's easier to go, what do I do when I'm overwhelmed? Like I need to take a middle break. I need to step out. But just like what if I said, well, every time I come to the podcast, I'm like, oh, man, I get really kind of stressed.
I'm not stressed. I'm probably unprepared. And there's something I can do about that. I can prepare.
So the words we use really makes a difference. It gives our mind something to focus on because the way our brain works, it's a problem solver. You know, when you wake up at night and it starts solving problems and you get your answer at 2 a.m. of something that you were thinking about earlier.
So I think naming it to tame it, that's not mine. I don't know where I heard it, but I think that it is really good guidance to know. And if you walk in to talk to your wife, Joey, or your daughter, you know, Lori, like, what have you got them to check in? Like, what are you feeling there?
Like, how's your day? And if good, I bet it's not just good. I'll say that's good. See how he said it that thing.
Like, to me, that is like, I don't know, good. That's my response. And you're always upbeat, like, hey, I'm just like, oh no. I, yeah.
Sometimes like today I even stop because you know, I'm talking about these topics. I was like, oh, am I today? I was like, I am, I'm so content. And I'm just full full of what would be what my mind is.
I'm full. I'm full. I'm full. I just, I don't know.
Today's a good day. Yesterday was a frazzled day. But today's all right. All right.
How are you, Lori? Good. Check in with yourself. I check in with Nyla.
That's fine. And we've got a live podcast. We'd love to hear from you. All you have to do is email us info at thegiftedlife.org.
In every episode of The Gifted Life, we honor a hero. Today our hero is Brett Flowers. And we learn about Brett from his family. With heavy hearts, but immense pride, we honor the life and legacy of Brett Flowers.
In his passing, he gave the greatest gift of all, the gift of life. Through his selfless act of our donation, he has become a beacon of hope for others, offering second chances and renewed tomorrows to those in need. Brett lived with kindness, generosity, and spirit that touched everyone he met. Though our hearts ache in his absence, we find comfort in knowing that his legacy lives on, not just in our memories, but in the lives he has saved.
To those who are blessed by his gift, we hope you carry a piece of his incredible spirit forward. And to all who knew and loved him, let us honor his memory continuing to spread love, kindness, and generosity just as he did. We pause and say thank you to Brett for the gift of life. Episode 255 of the gift of life in the book, guys.
Thanks for listening and remember you can register as an organ, eye, and tissue donor anytime at registerme.org. Yeah, very special thanks to Miss Teen Louisiana, Virginia Kirkpatrick for coming on. She was so amazing. It's funny.
We talked about it before and having a conversation with her. She is so advanced beyond her years. You would not know how. I was talking to a 30-year-old the whole time.
So nice to have her in our corner and spreading the platform of donation in her upcoming events. Yeah, we love Miss Virginia. So thanks for all you do, ma'am. The best place to find us, tell your friends, is at our website, the gift of life.org.
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Until next time.