Amber Smith, the wife of country star Granger Smith, returned to Instagram on Sunday (July 14) with some bittersweet news about how the tragic June passing of the couple's 3-year-old son River has already saved two adults in need of an organ transplant.
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"I've always known I wanted to be a donor if anything were to ever happen to me," Amber wrote. "I just felt that if I had viable organs, why would I go into the ground with them? My spirit would be in Heaven, so why not save a life if I could? Never in a million years did I think I would be making that decision for my baby. When three different neuro specialists told us that River had zero percent chance of brain recovery... after shock and reality set in, I thought, how can we bury our sweet baby and not try to help others? His body is perfect, his organs are perfect, (so) we had to do something."
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River's organs, so small that they were measured physically and not just with x-rays, have already saved a 49-year-old woman and a 53-year-old man with undisclosed health issues.
"I pray these two recipients live healthy, joy filled, full throttle lives just like Riv," Amber adds. "It was one of the hardest, yet easiest, decisions we've ever made. There are over 113,000 people waiting for transplants and 20 people die each day waiting."
River died in early June after a drowning accident at home. His parents raised over $200,000 for the medical facility that tried saving his life, Dell Children's Medical Center in Austin, through sales of a sold-out tribute t-shirt.
Amber closes her online statement with a plea for everyone to visit OrganDonor.gov to find out how they, too, can save lives. Per the website's statistics, 36, 528 transplants were performed in 2018, with 20 people on the organ donor wait list dying each day.
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