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By TIM WILKIN, Staff writer
First published: Sunday, June 15, 2003
Many nights, Lorraine Wheeler lay awake in her home in Seymour,
Conn., staring at the ceiling, tears rolling down her cheeks.
In those dark, lonely nights, sleep would not find her.
It was late in the year 2000. Wheeler was in excruciating
pain. She wanted to die.
"I asked God to take me home many times," Wheeler
said. "I was not living. I did not have a high quality
of life. I didn't have any life."
Three years earlier, doctors said her liver was shutting
down. If Wheeler was to survive, she needed a transplant.
She got weaker and weaker as time passed. Every month she
went to a hospital to have seven to 10 liters of fluids removed
from her body.
She gave her clothes away to a women's shelter. She gave
her furniture to The Salvation Army. She told friends what
to take when she was gone.
She was on a transplant list, without guarantees. She was
running out of time. Mass.-Conn. a travel hockey team for
10- to 12-year-old youths, practiced on Tuesday and Thursday
nights at the Civic Center in Springfield, Mass. For some
reason that first week of December 2000, practice was scheduled
for Monday.
No matter. Quinn Connally, a 12-year-old defenseman, was
ready to play any time, any day.
Driving home from work on Dec. 4, 2000, Quinn's dad, Steve,
looked forward to staying home. The two had spent a long
weekend traveling to hockey games on the Connecticut shore,
and Steve was tired. He was hoping his son was, too.
But as Steve pulled into the driveway at the family home
in Cheshire, Mass., there was Quinn, bounding out the back
door, his baseball cap on sideways, his shirt half tucked
in and half out, a hockey bag slung over his shoulder.
Steve knew he wasn't going to win this one; he didn't even
try.
"Where you been? We're late. Let's go," Quinn
said.
The trip to Springfield took an hour and 15 minutes. Quinn
did homework and sang to music on the radio, tapping his
pencil on the dashboard.
The Zamboni had just finished smoothing the Civic Center
ice when Quinn led the Braves out of the locker room.
"He looked at me and this big smile came across his
face and he said, 'See ya later,' " Steve said, "and
he jumped on the ice and off he went."
Fifteen minutes into practice, Quinn was diving to the ice,
spinning around trying to block a shot. The puck hit him
in the back of the neck, just beneath his helmet. His father
ran onto the ice.
"People were trying to wake him up," Steve Connally
said. "And we could not wake him up."
Paramedics rushed Quinn to the Bay State Medical Center
in Springfield, where his parents kept an all-night vigil.
A CT showed massive hemorrhaging. It was one week before
Quinn's 13th birthday.
The puck had crushed the two carotid arteries that supply
blood to the brain. Quinn would never move again. The chances
of this kind of accident, doctors said later, were a billion
to one.
Steve and Ann Connally wondered if they should let their
only son go. If they did, they decided, they should give
life to others. What surprised them was how many people they
could save. Wheeler was making lunch on the afternoon of
Dec. 6 when the call came. A donor had been found.
"I was excited, not scared at all," Wheeler said. "It
used to be that I was asking my doctors how soon was I going
to die. Now, I was going to live."
The new liver was inside her a few hours later, and, almost
immediately, the pain she had lived with the last three years
was gone.
What she wanted to know most of all was where her new liver
came from.
"I asked every nurse that came into my room," Wheeler
said. "But they told me they couldn't say anything.
(All) I knew was it came from a little boy and I felt bad.
I wanted to know what happened to this poor little boy. There
were TV reports about a young boy who had died in a car accident,
and I assumed that was where it came from. I felt sad about
that." Dec. 19, 2000, staffers wheeled Lamont Holder
into a news conference at Jewish Hospital in Louisville,
Ky. At the young age of 30, Holder had undergone heart transplant
surgery 13 days earlier.
He found out where his new heart came from while he was
still recuperating in the hospital. It made him cry. The
night before he had been watching the Anaheim Mighty Ducks
on TV.
"I know how much he liked hockey," Holder said
from his Clarksville, Ind., home. "I have newspaper
articles about Quinn and I have seen his picture, and that
is burned in my head now. I have been given a second chance
at life. I am living for two people. I am living for Quinn,
too." Michael Connally loved playing sports, and hockey
most of all. He wore No. 25 -- the same as Darren McCarty,
his favorite player on his favorite team, the Detroit Red
Wings.
Quinn was growing fast and by age 12, the brown-eyed, brown-haired
youngster stood 5-foot-11 and weighed 130 pounds. He wore
size 12 shoes.
He wasn't the fastest skater and he wasn't the most gifted.
It took him three tries to make the Braves' hockey squad.
But no one would ever outwork Quinn.
"He was very intelligent on the ice," said Jim
Callahan, Quinn's coach. "When he tried out the third
time, I told him he had to show me his skills. He then went
out and stickhandled the puck. Quinn was a great person,
a great team person. He couldn't do enough for the kids on
the team." Quinn died, seven of his organs -- his heart
and liver, kidneys, corneas and pancreas -- were donated.
Only his heart left New England. It went to Kentucky and
Lamont Holder, an African-American who shared Quinn's rare
B-negative blood type.
His lungs would have been donated, too, but Quinn had been
coming down with a cold.
"We know that Quinn would have been so proud to be
able to help others," said Ann Connally, 44.
The Connallys now dedicate their lives to keeping Quinn's
memory alive. They've decided to be organ donors themselves.
They established the not-for-profit Quinn's Legacy Foundation,
which is raising money to build the Quinn Connally Memorial
Sports Facility in Pittsfield by year's end.
The facility will cost $7 million and will house a dual
ice rink for recreational skating, ice skating, figure and
speed skating and hockey programs. So far, the foundation
has raised $1 million.
Wheeler, now 50, spends most of her time in her small condominium
in Seymour. When the weather is right, she tends to her garden.
A framed photo of Quinn stands atop her television in her
bedroom. Two more photos grace her living room. His picture
wallpapers her computer screen.
"Right now I feel wonderful and I certainly do feel
I am a part of Quinn," she said. "Not a day goes
by that I don't think about him. For as long as I live ...
20, 30, hopefully 40 years ... I will remember him and what
he did for me. It is hard to explain how grateful I am to
Quinn and his family."
Wheeler met the Connallys only once, but she talks with
them periodically and they share e-mails.
The Connallys also have met the man who received one of
Quinn's kidneys, and they learned about Holder through newspaper
accounts. The four other recipients remain unknown to them.
Organ donors are revealed to the recipients only if they
ask, and only if the donor's family agrees.
"It's kind of hard to explain, but they are all pretty
courageous people with what they were facing. I am not trying
to push anything on anyone, but it's almost like an intimate
family," said Steve Connally, 43. "I can honestly
say there is nothing I would not do for Lorraine or Lamont.
They are grateful for their second chance, and we can feel
that." 's quiet these days around the Connallys' house
on Dean Street in Cheshire, Mass.
Too quiet.
Black smudges left by hockey pucks scar the front of the
big old farm house. In a bedroom upstairs, a baseball glove
rests on the shelf, folded over, a tennis ball tucked inside.
Half a dozen hockey jerseys hang on a wall.
The Connallys often pull out scrapbooks and look at photosof
happier times. There is Quinn, wearing sunglasses, mugging
for the camera. There is Quinn flexing his muscles in the
locker room with his fellow Braves. There he is clowning
with his sister Tessa, who is now 13.
"It seems like it was just yesterday, but it also seems
like it has been an eternity," Steve Connally said,
his eyes trained on pictures of Quinn. "Every morning
it's a struggle to get up. Every day is a struggle."
Ann Connally sometimes finds flowers and hockey pucks left
at her son's grave by unknown visitors.
He is buried in St. Stanislaus Cemetery, about 10 minutes
from the Connally home.
"We have had peaks and valleys through this," Ann
said. "At any given moment, no matter how happy you
think you are, you get a smell or see a photo, you hear a
song."
Then Ann starts to talk about her dream, and the tears begin
to pool in her eyes.
"I saw him and he was at the age that he died. He had
his navy blue gym shirt on and he was at school," she
said. "I was going to pick him up. When I got there,
he was behind a half wall and eating an orange. I could not
get to him because the wall was there. I said, 'Quinn, I'm
here to pick you up.' He told me he couldn't go with me.
I reached over and gave him a hug.
"If he had smiled at me or said, 'I'm doing OK' or
'How did I get here?' ... but he didn't and that bothered
me. I'm sure he misses us as much as we miss him. Most of
the dreams I have are good, but that was very disturbing
because I could not take him home. And he was so sad." for
the Quinn Connally Memorial Sports Facility can be sent to
Quinn's Legacy Foundation Inc., c/o Berkshire Bank, 66 West
St., Pittsfield, MA 01201. For more information, call (413)
743-7558.
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