Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Monday, July 07, 2008
I know its out-of-focus, but it's actually my favorite photo!
In an effort not to post all 58 photos, I went ahead and made a slideshow of the other 50 I made. Click on the Photoshop Express link below to view slideshow. I'd like to know what your favorite is? But, since its a slideshow, I guess you'll just have to describe it for me!!
Photoshop Express
U.S. Transplant Olympic Games
The following is a photo shoot I did for the Associated Press — dealing with a family in Mayfield, Ky., who donated an organ to a girl that now resides in Miami, Fla. They donated the organ nearly 25 years ago and are going to meet each other for the first time at this month's U.S. Transplant Olympic Games in Pittsburgh.
I've added the story and will try to add links as to where it shows up at
Liver donor's family, recipient unite online
By JENNIFER C. YATES
Associated Press Writer
PITTSBURGH (AP) _ They were precocious toddlers, both blond-haired and blue-eyed,
separated by a thousand miles between Miami and a small Kentucky town.
The two girls would never meet, but would be brought together through unthinkable tragedy: Trine Engebretsen was born with a genetic disorder that would require what at the time was an extremely rare liver transplant, and Amanda DeLapp would die at just 18 months after being stricken with a brain tumor.
In a rare surgery in Pittsburgh in 1984, Amanda's family donated their daughter's liver to Trine, making her one of the nation's youngest patients ever to receive a liver transplant.
For years, each family would try to contact the other. Trine's family sent a picture of their daughter dressed for Christmas to the DeLapp family, a picture that still sits on the bedroom dresser of Alisha DeLapp, Amanda's mother. That correspondence was followed by years of miscommunication, with each family mistakenly thinking the other didn't want any contact.
But Amanda's younger sister, born after her death, never gave up hope of one day meeting the girl who received her sister's liver. Keisha DeLapp had found Trine on the Internet years ago, and read about her participation as a swimmer in the U.S. Transplant Games. She read about Trine's wonderful health, including her complete independence from drugs that prevent organ rejection.
Like other twentysomethings, Keisha also kept a MySpace page, with a simple quote at the top: "Faith is not simply believing that God can ... It is knowing that He will."
Earlier this year, Keisha decided to look for Trine online again. This time, she looked on MySpace and found what she was looking for.
"Hi. I'm Keisha DeLapp, Amanda DeLapp's sister. Me and my family would love to have contact with you if you would like to. Let me know."
This month, the U.S. Transplant Games will be held for the first time in Pittsburgh, one of the pioneering centers for transplants in the country, and 25 years after the successful surgery here that forever connected the Engebretsen and DeLapp families.
At the games, these two families will look each other in the eyes for the first time, exchanging hellos, hugs and memories of an event that changed both their lives.
___
Amanda was Alisha DeLapp's first child. Born in 1981, the little girl known as Mandy to her family was healthy and happy, even walking by the time she was 8 months old, her mother recalls.
A year later, everything would change. Amanda was hospitalized because she was vomiting and had pneumonia-like symptoms. Her parents rushed her to the hospital closest to their Mayfield, Ky., home, where doctors were unable to figure out what was wrong. Her condition deteriorated and, fearing the worst, doctors urgently rushed Amanda to a hospital in Nashville, about two hours away.
Doctors there found the problem, delivering the somber news to her anxious parents: Their daughter had a brain tumor and was going to die. Amanda DeLapp was 18 months old.
At the hospital, the couple was approached by a nurse who asked if they would consider donating Amanda's organs.
"To me, at that time, it had to be God helping us to decide," Alisha DeLapp remembers. "I can look back at that now and know it was the hardest decision I ever had to make."
She refused an autopsy for Amanda, but decided her organs could benefit someone else.
Alisha and her husband returned home to Kentucky. On TV, they watched on the news that a little girl named Trine had received a liver transplant. Alisha remembered the little girl; she had seen Trine and her mom, Mary Ann Lunde, on the Phil Donahue show appealing for help. They had also made other national TV appearances, including on NBC's "Today" show and the national news broadcasts.
The DeLapps knew immediately that their daughter's liver had saved Trine's life. (They would later find out that Amanda's kidneys were also donated to a man in his 20s.)
Transplants were rare at the time, and in a matter of hours the local news channels were calling the DeLapps for comment. They agreed to an interview with a local TV station, which was broadcast on the "Today" show.
The DeLapps' were interviewed along with Trine's family. They didn't speak directly to each other, but it was the closest the families would come to it for years.
Trine Engebretsen, now 26, doesn't remember much about her lifesaving liver transplant when she was 2½ years old.
She had been born with a genetic disorder called alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, which resulted in her body not producing enough of a key enzyme in the liver. Her liver was so severely damaged that her best hope at survival was a liver transplant, a rare and expensive operation in the early 1980s.
Trine's parents appealed for help on TV. Her father, who was a Norwegian citizen, also appealed to the Norwegian government, which agreed to pay for Trine's surgery. When she arrived at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh for the transplant, doctors estimated she had less than 24 hours to live.
Trine was one of several children who had transplants at the Pittsburgh hospital in 1983 and 1984, remembers pioneering transplant surgeon Dr. Thomas Starzl, who performed the surgery. Collectively, the patients were known as "Reagan children," so-called because then-President Reagan had been using his Saturday radio addresses to drum up public interest in transplantation.
"At the beginning of the 1980s, the only place in the U.S. that was doing these was here in Pittsburgh," Starzl said.
Starzl remembers Trine — her father was Norway's youngest passenger ship captain, lost at sea in a hurricane when Trine was 13 — and over the years says he has met several donor families.
"I was profoundly and still am profoundly grateful to them, particularly in those days because it wasn't common (to donate organs). It required a lot of social conscience," Starzl said.
Trine's liver transplant was a success.
___
Over the years, Trine's family tried to contact the DeLapp family. She knew the family lived in Kentucky, but says letters her mother sent to an address for Amanda's grandparents were returned, unopened.
Several years ago, Trine wrote a thank you note to the DeLapps for the lifesaving organ transplant and gave it to the local organ-procurement organization for Kentucky hoping they could pass it along to the family. The note never made it to them.
Meanwhile, she immersed herself in transplant-related endeavors — not because she felt she had to, but because she wanted to.
"I very much feel that it's important and also I like to give back. I don't feel like I'm under an obligation. I want to give back," Trine said.
She first attended the U.S. Transplant Games in 1992, and has attended most of the games since then. She has participated in swimming, running and even signed up for the shot put this year.
She met her fiance, Ryan Labbe, in an online forum about organ transplants. He moved from New England to Miami to be with her, and received his own liver transplant earlier this year.
Trine has been off immunosuppressant medications for 11 years, something that's becoming more common among transplant recipients. She is applying for medical school, in hopes of studying something transplant-related, and currently works for the Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency in Florida.
It was a Friday night at her office, around 6 p.m., when her Blackberry went off. It was a friend request from her MySpace page.
It was from 23-year-old Keisha DeLapp.
"I almost fell off my chair," Trine says.
Alisha DeLapp, now 48, went on to have Keisha and a son before she and her husband divorced. She followed Trine's progress through online stories written about her from the various U.S. Transplant Games she competed in over the years. She kept the picture of Trine as a child in her Christmas dress — eerily, it was the same dress Amanda had worn in a Christmas snapshot — and hoped one day to be able to update it with a more recent photo.
"I know it's not my daughter, but it's just as special knowing that my daughter saved her life," Alisha DeLapp said. "I'm proud of her, with the things that she's chosen to do with her life. It's so impressive to me."
The two families have been communicating via e-mail since Keisha and Trine made contact earlier this year. They've talked about the many years they tried to connect, and how thankful they are for each other — each in their own ways.
"I've waited 24 years to be able to say thank you," Trine says from her home in Florida.
When the transplant games commence on July 11, the three will meet for the first time in downtown Pittsburgh, just miles from where Trine's surgery took place. Starzl will also be there to greet them. The women will give thanks for each other through hellos and hugs, and probably some tears.
"I never got to know my sister. I never got to meet her or anything. By no means is Trine my sister, but that's kind of like a part of her," Keisha says. "This whole experience, I'm just glad that it happened."
ABCnews.com
Yahoo news
Yahoo Espana
The State, South Carolina
York Daily Record - York,PA,USA
Belleville News Democrat
Kansas City Star
Houston Chonicle
Las Cruces Sun News, New Mexico
The Daily News Transcript, Norwood, MA
Philly.com
In-Forum
Newser
InsideBayArea.com
MyMotherLode.com
Bribart.com
WFLX Fox 29 - West Palm Beach,FL,USA
KPIC CBS-4 Roseburg, Oregon
Summertime Snapshots — Dolly Konwinski
The following is from a fun — featury story we did for the Fourth of July Weekend. I thought it turned out pretty well, but the story was even better.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
By TOMMY DILLARD
Sports Writer
At a time when America desperately needed a diversion, they provided it.
Combining surprising athleticism with graceful femininity, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League took the Midwest by storm and filled a void in society while many of the national pasttime’s top male stars were fighting in World War II.
You likely know them from the popular movie A League of Their Own. But the two-hour film barely scrapes the surface of the true-life experience of Dolly Niemiec Konwinski.
Konwinski is doing her part to preserve the league’s unique history by traveling throughout the country speaking in schools, parks and community centers. She made a stop in western Kentucky Tuesday night and addressed a crowd of around 75 people at H.H. Lovett Park in Benton.
Topics ranged from a childhood spent playing baseball with the boys to attending charm school under a league mandate to encouraging parents and community members to take care of their children’s ballfields.
Of course one of Konwinski’s main talking points was A League of Their Own, which she claims is about 80 percent accurate. The movie is a fictionalized account of the league, but Konwinski said she and her former teammates believed the film faithfully captured the spirit of the women who left their homes to become celebrated ballplayers.
Not everything was true, however.
“We never had a manager use our toitie (toilet),” she recalled. “Managers never came in until we had our uniforms on.”
Many of the scenes in the movie were taken from actual conversations that took place amongst players or coaches, Konwinski said.
“When we heard it was going to be a comedy starring Madonna, we were worried,” she said. “But we loved it. Anything Madonna might have done before or after that movie is discounted in our eyes.”
The film has almost singlehandedly kept the long-defunct league well within the collective consciousness of Americans.
As for Konwinski herself, it never mattered much that girls growing up in the 1940s weren’t supposed to be baseball players. She spent her long summer days playing alongside the boys in the sandlots of her hometown of Chicago.
There was no organization, just kids being kids.
The bases were often pieces of cardboard. If no cardboard was available, the search was on for large, flat rocks.
Sometimes they’d have to use a sickle to cut down weeds growing in the lots.
And then there was the crotchety old woman who didn’t want the ball coming anywhere near her house.
“This one lady across the street, boy if we hit a ball in her yard, she’d come out there and she’d yell across the street, ‘Mrs. Niemiec, Mrs. Niemiec, when is your daughter gonna start being a girl and stop playing with these boys,’” she remembered. “I said, ‘Mama, never.’”
Konwinski’s father taught her how to hit, field and run the bases and also prompted her to try out for the AAGPBL at the age of 16. She made it and was assigned to the South Bend Blue Sox before soon being traded to the Grand Rapids Chicks, where she played third base for the remainder of her career.
Not only did she fall in love with the town of Grand Rapids, but also with Bob Konwinski. The two married in 1955, raised four children in Grand Rapids and reside there still today.
Though she didn’t join the league until six years after its beginnings, she says the movie accurately portrays the AAGPBL’s early years. In one scene, manager Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks, urges his team, “Let’s go girls. Dozens of people are waiting for the game to start.”
“The reception wasn’t good,” Konwinski said. “They said, ‘Girls can’t play baseball.’ But then they warmed up to us and it became a family thing. Families could walk to the ballpark and dad would say to mother in the morning, ‘Have the kids get their homework done and have an early dinner, we’re going to see the Chicks.’”
The league was formed by Philip Wrigley, who had inherited the Chicago Cubs from his father. With young men being drafted into the armed services, Wrigley feared that if the war continued, Major League Baseball was in danger of shutting down. Most minor league clubs had already suspended play due to a lack of quality talent.
Wrigley gathered a committee to examine the problem, which was particularly foreboding to Major League owners and their pocketbooks. The solution, they determined, was to organize a girls’ softball league capable of playing in Major League ballparks should the situation become dire.
There were several challenges facing the owners, however. Exactly what game would be played, baseball or softball? Where would they find enough talented women to fill rosters? Would the nation embrace the idea of women playing professional baseball?
To answer the first question, organizers created a game that meshed qualities of both baseball and softball. The ball was a softball and pitches were thrown underhand, but the basepaths and mound-to-plate distance were extended beyond traditional softball. Also unlike softball, base stealing was allowed.
The second issue was solved through an already-established Major League scouting network. Though fans first came for the novelty, Konwinski estimated that what kept people coming back was the talent of the players, which exceeded the expectations of many.
Wrigley attempted to solve the third problem through marketing the women as not only athletes, but also proper ladies. Players were required to attend charm school, where they learned to put on makeup and carry themselves. When in public, they were required to wear a dress or skirt at all times.
The league continued to evolve from the time of its formation to its disbanding in 1954. Major League Baseball never shut down, and though the AAGPBL attempted to forge its way into major markets, it found most of its success in medium-sized towns such as Grand Rapids.
The league reached its height during the 1948 season when the 10 teams attracted 910,000 paid fans.
The time period was a revolutionary one for women, and the AAGPBL helped extend that progressive thinking into the sporting arena.
“I think we paved the way for young ladies to do whatever they want,” Konwinski said. “If they want to play basketball, we’ve got the WNBA. We’ve got the Olympic team. The Olympians told us, ‘Because of you ladies, we now have the chance.’ We’re called pioneers.”
Though her baseball-playing days eventually ended, Konwinski never gave up sports. Bob was an esteemed bowler and took Dolly under his wing. She eventually bowled professionally.
After coaching her two boys in Little League baseball, she served 15 years as an umpire for high schools and colleges. Now, she acts as a cheerleader for her grandchildren.
While her years with the AAGPBL gave her some of her fondest memories, it wasn’t all fun and games for Konwinski and her teammates. Unlike today’s major leaguers, who generally play six games per week, the women usually played eight.
“It was seven days a week with doubleheaders on Sunday,” she remembers. “And you think we didn’t do rain dances.”
But if there is anything A League of Their Own taught Konwinski, it’s that worthwhile endeavors are not usually easy.
“My favorite part in the movie is when Dottie is leaving and she says, ‘It’s just too hard,’” she said. “Jimmy says, ‘It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard ... is what makes it great.’”
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