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Recent university graduate, Tom Wilson, 22, was excited to be beginning his life away from home as a trainee surveyor at one of London’s property development companies. He was living with his cousin, had a job he loved, and was, overall, thrilled.
His mom, Lisa, recalled, “He'd phone me just to say: 'Mum: I'm walking down New Bond Street, looking at all the Christmas lights!'”
Everyone who knew Tom knew he was a gentleman, polite and considerate to everyone around him. He was the last person anyone wanted to wish ill.
But on a Tuesday night last December, Lisa received a call from one of Tom’s friends. “Lisa, Tom's had an accident,” said one of Tom’s friends. Lisa wondered if her son had simply broken an ankle.
And then she heard Tom’s friend ask if Tom was still breathing.
“And as I stood there in the kitchen, my whole world fell apart,” Lisa recalled.
She gathered the entire family – her husband from a noisy pub, and her daughter away at university – and rushed them all to the hospital where nurses and consultants showed them Tom’s MRI scans.
During hockey practice, he’d been hit in the back of the head with someone else’s stick. His brain had begun bleeding and he’d lost consciousness. As someone called an ambulance, another teammate performed CPR to keep oxygen flowing through his body.
But by the time Tom arrived at the hospital, the bleeding in his brain had already taken over.
“We’re going to move him to intensive care, but there’s nothing more we can do for your son,” the consultant told the Wilson family.
The entire family spent more time together in the ICU, but ultimately, Lisa and her husband, Graham, returned home. Tom’s sister, Pippa, stayed overnight in the hospital with her brother.
It was that night, at home, that Graham asked Lisa, “Do you think we ought to think about organ donations?”
Lisa hadn’t considered it at all, but she knew, in her heart even as she grieved for her son, that it was the right thing to do.
The following morning at the hospital, Lisa and Graham approached the nurse about donating Tom’s organs – only to be told that Tom had signed up to be an organ donor when he was still attending university.
The Wilson family not only felt relieved, because “it took the pressure off [their] shoulders — but they also knew it was something Tom had always wanted.
Tom’s organs have since gone to 50 different people and saved many lives. Lisa still mourns the fact that her son will never have children of his own, but finds solace in the fact that somewhere in the world, a 3-year-old girl is alive thanks to her son’s selflessness.
