FLOWOOD, Miss. (WLBT) – With just days to go until the start of the Paris Olympics, a new group of athletes will represent Mississippi at the 2024 USA Transplant Games in Birmingham.
The event will allow participants to discover what is possible in life after an organ transplant.
“I started attending the event in 2014,” Timothy Lewis said.
Since then, he's received a heart transplant and represented Mississippi in the Transplant Games, an Olympic-style competition for organ transplant recipients. He and John Wilkerson, who received a new kidney in 2019, are on the MS team. They are among 37 athletes competing in the biennial games.
“We got a chance to show what our lives are like now after going through the trauma of organ failure of any kind,” Lewis said, “and to represent the families of the organ donors who gave us a second chance at life.”
Lewis and Wilkerson have both won gold medals in their sports. Lewis has won gold, silver and bronze medals in track and field, basketball and volleyball. Wilkerson has won a gold medal in basketball. This is Wilkerson, a 61-year-old former auto worker, competing in the events for the second time.
“It was the first time I met people who had kidney, heart and liver transplants, some of them from Mississippi,” Wilkerson said, “and after I went, I told my wife, this is going to be a once-every-two-years operation.”
The players are sponsored by the Mississippi Organ Recovery Authority.
“One organ donor saves up to eight lives and one tissue donor saves over 75 lives,” said MORA Community Outreach Coordinator Belinda Lane. “We need everyone to register, regardless of age or medical condition. We need everyone to register.”
Six organ donor families in the state will be honored during the event. The 2024 event, to be held July 5-10 in Birmingham, Alabama, is expected to attract 8,000 transplant recipients from 48 states and several countries.
For more information about organ donation, Click here for detailsIf you would like to register as an organ donor, Click here for details.
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