Tara Bourque encourages everyone to give the gift of life
With Thanksgiving this past weekend, we may have all taken some time to reflect and consider the things we are thankful for. However, it sometimes becomes too easy to take certain things for granted. For most people, breathing is something that is not frequently thought about. For 20-year-old lung transplant recipient Tara Bourque, who was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at the age of 14 months, breathing wasn’t always as easy for her as it is now. This Thanksgiving, Bourque is extending an extra helping of gratitude to her donor for giving her the gift of life.
Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a mutation in the lungs that causes a mucus build-up, making breathing difficult and causing the lungs to be prone to infection. Although the degree of sickness varies across patients, people who struggle with the disease need to partake in daily therapy and medication in order to combat it, and most people end up requiring lung transplants to survive.
Although Bourque was born with the disease, it never stopped her from living a normal childhood in her hometown of Sarnia, Ontario. “I was considered the healthiest CF patient as a child in clinic,” she said. “I was able to play soccer, volleyball, and basketball with only having to take about an hour or two out of my day to do my treatments.” Her treatments consisted of inhaling medications through a nebulizer as well as daily physiotherapy routines to clear the mucus from her lungs. The disease also didn’t allow her to digest food properly, so she needed to take three to four pills anytime she had a snack or five to six pills before a meal.
In January 2011, her final year of high school, Bourque’s health started to decline and she was checked into a London area hospital for two and a half weeks. Afterward, she was sent home with an intravenous drip and an oxygen tank that needed to be hooked up to allow her to sleep at night. Later in May, on the day after her prom, she was admitted into Sick Kids Hospital for a month and a half stay, where it was first mentioned that she might need a lung transplant. “I ignored it and pretended no one had said anything,” said Bourque. Later that same year, Bourque was accepted to the University of Guelph for Criminal Justice and Public Policy.
However, the problem couldn’t be ignored, her disease worsened and her daily treatments kept increasing. In October 2011, Bourque was forced to leave school and admit herself into a CF clinic in Toronto for an additional two and a half months.
“I was officially named the sickest patient at the clinic,” said Bourque. “At my worst I was spending six hours a day on treatments and meds. I was short of breath just walking down the stairs from the bedroom to the living room. I had no energy to shower, eat, talk or do anything. At this point I was down to about 78 pounds and lower than 16 per cent lung function. CF controlled my entire life and my ability to do anything.”
Bourque wanted to go home for Christmas that year, so she wasn’t able to put herself on the waiting list for new lungs until January 2012 (in order to be on the list, you must be within 2 hours of Toronto). Although she was told that her wait for lungs would be anywhere from six to nine months, Bourque was incredibly surprised and grateful to receive news that she would be receiving a new pair of lungs only 11 days after listing.
After her transplant, Bourque remained in the hospital for 18 days recovering and required another three months of physiotherapy. The following May, she received the great news that she would finally be able to move back home.
Bourque maintained a positive and courageous demeanour throughout the transplant process, but admits that it would have been very difficult to do so without all the support she received. “My friends, family and boyfriend were all huge supports throughout everything. I wouldn’t have made it through all the ‘bad days’ and rough times without them,” said Bourque.
She kept updating her Facebook status to keep friends and family in the loop and received numerous comments of support in return. She expressed special gratitude to all her friends for the emotional support, to her sisters for keeping her in the daily loop, helping her feel like she had a “somewhat normal life,” and to her boyfriend, who Bourque said was someone who, even from out of town, was able to support her and be someone she could rely on and talk to about anything. In her hometown, friends and family in the community held a fundraiser and raised $25,000 to help relieve the financial burden of additional living expenses and medications.
This past April, Bourque began working with both the Trillium Gift of Life network and Cystic Fibrosis Canada, telling her story and doing a great deal of work advocating for organ donation.
“I now can go out and do whatever I want to do without thinking about how exhausted or tiring it will be to do so,” says Bourque. “My outlook on life is a little different – [I] definitely appreciate the little things and make sure that whatever I’m doing makes me happy.”
When asked why people should sign up to be donors, Bourque said, “My organ donor is my hero, and who doesn’t want to be a hero?” Bourque is back at Guelph working on her degree in Psychology with a Minor in Child and Family studies, and hopes to work in hospitals as a counsellor and social worker after graduation. She encourages everyone to sign up to be donor.
“You can save up to eight lives once you’ve passed away,” she says. “There is no negative side to organ donation…you’re giving someone a second chance at life – a chance at a life they never could have even imagined to be possible.”