Heart recipient grateful to family

Andrea Domaskin, The Forum
Published Wednesday, May 16, 2007

When 4-month-old Michael McCann died in 1986, parents Karen and Steve McCann donated his organs because they thought they could help someone.

They did, though a National Guard F-4 fighter jet had to scramble to bring the infant heart from Fargo to California after a Stanford Hospital jet broke down at Hector International Airport.

Twenty years later, the Fargo couple has met the young man who received their son Michael’s heart.

Andrew De La Pena, now a student at Loyola University New Orleans, is in Fargo for a few days with his parents. They’re reuniting with the governor, Guard officials and others who made his transplant possible.

The McCann family met the De La Pena family, of Hawaii, Monday for dinner. Karen McCann said she couldn’t stop looking at Andrew.

“I wanted to sit there and just study him all night,” she said after a Tuesday news conference at the Fargo Air Museum.

The dinner was emotional, said Deborah McCarthy, Andrew’s mother.

“But not overly so,” added Steven De La Pena, Andrew’s father. “Probably the most emotional was Andrew.”

Andrew was 5 months old when he received the transplant. He was lucky to receive one because people didn’t often donate infant hearts in those days, said Marguerite Brown, who served as the Stanford donor coordinator on that flight and was in Fargo on Tuesday.

“There’s not a pulse that goes through my veins without me appreciating the gift they gave me,” Andrew said at the news conference, organized in part by LifeSource, which coordinates organ donation in the Midwest.

Former Gov. George Sinner, Col. Bob Becklund and others recounted the dramatic flight in December 1986, and Gov. John Hoeven and Sinner presented a Donor Medal of Honor to the McCanns.

Hoeven noted that North Dakota is adopting the Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which honors the choice of someone to be a donor or decline to be a donor, and strengthens the language barring others from overriding a donor’s decision.

“When you hear this story, you realize why it’s so very, very important,” Hoeven said.