In a playroom in her apartment complex, Azhaar Myers twirls the hair of an Elsa Barbie doll. She pretends to cook in a play kitchen. And she has just one medical complaint — a bumped nose from trying some gymnastics off a tiny couch in the playroom earlier that day.
Azhaar, 3, had a liver transplant about nine months ago at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, one of a near-record 2,286 people in Pennsylvania to receive an organ transplant last year.
Organ donation numbers have increased both locally and nationally in recent years.
In 2024, the Western Pennsylvania region set a record for organ donation for the sixth year in a row. The Center for Organ Recovery & Education reported that 472 people donated organs in 2024 in its service area, which includes Western Pa., West Virginia and Chemung County, N.Y. That number is a 17% increase from the prior year.
“I think it’s the awareness both in the public and in our health care system about organ donation,” said Susan Stuart, president and CEO of CORE, “and the great need.”
Stuart credited an increase in awareness in part to efforts from CORE, which include speaking at schools and working with hospital outreach departments, and also to the power of social media, where people can post about friends or family members who need organs, or share their own stories of organ donation.
“Social media is a great vehicle for reaching large audiences — for reaching out to people of different ages and ethnicities to promote the great need for donation and making those connections,” she said.
She also credited the increase to advances in science and technology that can better preserve organs and optimize their function prior to the transplant.
The number of tissue and cornea donors also increased in CORE’s service area in 2024: an 8% increase to a record 905 cornea donors and a 12% increase to 1,654 tissue donors. Each tissue donor can help heal up to 75 people, meaning that as many as 125,000 people were helped by bone repairs, skin grafts and heart valve replacements and other tissue transplants from tissue donors.
While organ donation has increased, the number of organs donated still falls far short of the need. More than 100,000 people nationwide are on transplant waiting lists.
For a time last year, Azhaar was one of those people. She moved to Pittsburgh about a year ago from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, because of the expertise of the doctors at Children’s Hospital in liver transplants.
After her 4-month check-up in South Carolina, Azhaar was diagnosed with biliary atresia, a rare condition in which a baby’s bile ducts don’t develop correctly. She received a previous liver transplant that was failing due to blood flow issues.
Her mother, Qwontajah Myers, was willing to give a portion of her liver to be a living donor, but because that transplant wouldn’t include the bile ducts and because Myers would still need to care for Azhaar and her three siblings, doctors recommended that she wait as long as possible for a deceased donor.
In April, Myers was in a hospital playroom when she was told that the doctors needed to see her immediately. They told her that not only did they think a liver was available, but that it was a perfect match.
The transplant was a success. And though Azhaar recently spent a couple months in the hospital fighting a respiratory infection, the new liver is functioning well.
Myers received a letter from the family of the person who donated their liver to Azhaar, and learned that the donor, also from a large family, had a big personality. She recently sent the family a letter back to thank them and let them know the impact that their donation had made.
“I wish she could see how well Azhaar is doing right now,” she said.
At CORE, the 472 organ donors in 2024 contributed 462 kidneys, 257 livers, 101 hearts, 87 lungs, 2 intestines and 61 pancreata (including those for research). The organization is continuing to put initiatives in place to try to increase the number of organ and tissue donors.
“We’ll never settle for status quo. We can’t,” said Stuart. “There will never be a time where we aren’t striving to break the next record.”
First Published: January 25, 2025, 10:30 a.m.
Updated: January 27, 2025, 1:55 p.m.
