SingaporeA 14-year-old male student was practicing to run a 2.4 km distance at school when he suddenly suffered a stroke and died. His family agreed to donate to save the lives of three people.
Lu Huyen Trang, a student at Woodlands High School, collapsed at about 8 a.m. on May 2 and was taken to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in a coma. Doctors tried to save her, but she died on May 25, after 24 days in a coma.
Lianhe Zaobao, Lu’s mother, said she never thought that saying goodbye to her son at the school gate in early May would be her last. The doctor believes that Lu has an irregular heartbeat and cannot exercise vigorously.
“My family has no history of this disease, Lu has never complained or been upset. It happened so quickly,” Lu’s mother shared.
Right in the midst of her grief, she had to make another difficult decision: Whether to donate her son’s organs or not. Like many parents, Lu wanted to protect her son’s body for burial after his death, but she wavered when she learned that there were more than 400 patients waiting for an organ transplant. Before his death, Lu repeatedly shared with his mother his dream, which was to help as many people as possible.
“Thinking from my son’s perspective, I decided to call the hospital’s organ transplant coordinator,” Lu’s mother said.
Lu Huyen Trang, 14 years old, had a stroke while studying physical education and became an organ donor, saving the lives of three other people. Image: Zaobao
On the day she signed the consent form to donate her son’s organs, about 30 friends and relatives came to the hospital to say goodbye to Lu. According to a Zaobao reporter, the group sang a hymn for Lu to hear one last time, before her body was taken into the operating room. A friend shared that Lu liked to help others, was loved by everyone in the church and called him a “lovely boy”.
On May 26, the hospital announced that Lu’s organs including corneas, liver, kidneys, pancreas and skin had saved the lives of at least three people who were critically ill.