Richard Aidem was at his daughter’s softball tournament in 2006 in Kentucky when he was rushed to the hospital after struggling to breathe.
He was soon diagnosed with congestive heart failure, a serious condition when the heart fails to pump blood as efficiently as it should.
Then in 2012, Aidem called in sick to work and never went back, staying at home with a pump called a left-ventricular assist device inside his body and cords sticking out of his chest. By 2013, it became clear that he would need a heart transplant.
More than 10 years later, Aidem has a different life — thanks to receiving a donor’s heart.
“Every time I see my grandson, it’s a reminder that I could have missed the whole thing,” said the resident of Valencia.
Aidem was one of several speakers at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center who gathered on Wednesday, April 3, to honor the organ donors whose lives could not be saved, as well as their families. They were joined by OneLegacy Foundation, which supports the nation’s largest organ, eye, and tissue recovery organization and works with about 215 hospitals in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.
Aidem, whose wife Patricia Aidem is director of public relations at Providence Southern California, shared his story with the Orange County Register in 2015 and told it again on Wednesday as he spoke to the audience about the importance of becoming an organ donor.
Across the nation, 42,887 organ transplants were performed in 2022, a 4% increase compared to the previous year, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing, which serves as the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. More than 25,000 kidney transplants were performed in the U.S., an increase of 3% from 2021.
Last year, three patients at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center whose lives couldn’t be saved donated their organs to nine patients. Those three donors, in addition to two other…
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