Lone Star Circle of Life Bike Tour pedals for organ donation awareness
San Angelo native now living in Corpus Christi tells her story. Cycling group started in Canyon and a week later finished in Fredericksburg with stops in Lubbock, Abilene and San Angelo included.
She says it all the time.
“I live for two,” Sarah Pipkin-Love said. “I don’t do this life; ‘we’ do this life together.”
Why the plural? Because within this 39 year-old woman beats the heart of a selfless young man who would’ve been 29 this year.
Dylan Roberts died when he was 14. But before he did, he told his parents he wanted to be an organ and tissue donor in case anything might happen to him.
And it did.
“He was in an accident,” Pipkin-Love recalled. “He was able to save five people’s lives, and I got to be the lucky one to receive his heart.”
Choices
Her life had always been under a threat lurking in the background. Born with congenital heart disease, her life felt like it came with caveats.
“After my first open-heart surgery, I spent a month in the hospital. The doctor looked at my parents and said, ‘Let her be an athlete if she wants to be an athlete. Let her be a bookworm if she wants to be a bookworm,’” she said during a Nov. 5 stop in Abilene.
Born and raised in San Angelo, Pipkin-Love in middle school fearlessly wanted to play soccer, but the reality of her condition required a choice.
“Did I want to play on the field, or did I want to play at the goal?” she recalled. “I chose the goal, because I definitely couldn’t keep up with everybody else on the field.”
It served her well. After college, she spent a year playing goalie on McMurry University’s women’s soccer team and then transferred to West Texas A&M University where she continued in the sport and graduated.
A change comes
Her goal was to be a coach and teacher, and she soon returned to San Angelo to make it happen. But her heart had finally had enough.
“I went for a five-mile run one day, and I went into AFib and I couldn’t get out (of it),” she said.
Atrial fibrillation is when the upper chambers of the heart, the atria, begin beating in an irregular and rapid manner. Later that evening, Pipkin-Love passed out. She remembered the date, July 15, 2009, because it was also her dad’s birthday.
“Soon after, I went back to San Antonio, and my cardiologist said at that point, ‘I think you know it’s time to make a change,’ ” she recalled. “I’d gone from being a college athlete, running five miles, to now I couldn’t get from the door to a chair without losing my breath.”
Doctors prescribed medicine to assist with her recovery and outfitted Pipkin-Love with an external defibrillator. The physicians wanted her to get a little healthier before any surgery.
She returned to teach at Central High School while waiting to heal and then to get on the list for a heart transplant. A year after she’d gone into AFib, Pipkin-Love received Dylan Roberts’ heart on June 30, 2010.
Truly life-changing
Fifteen years on, she never forgets the life-changing gift of a young man she’d never known but knows to the bottom of her toes that it was he who saved her.
“I didn’t know what a good heart felt like, and now I do. I’ve been able to do full marathons. I’ve done an Iron Man,” she said. “I coach and I teach in Corpus Christi, and I’ve been able to get married and do so many different things because of the choice Dylan made.”
In fact, Pipkin-Love became so close with her donor’s family that his sister had a role in her wedding. And through them, she’s learned even more about him.
“Dylan Roberts was a fantastic young man,” she said. “He was from Floresville, and he loved to ride dirt bikes, to hunt. He just loved to enjoy life.”
Pedaling for awareness
Dylan’s selfless example plays into what brought Pipkin-Love back to Abilene on Nov. 5. The Lone Star Circle of Life Bike Tour, in its 26th year, invited her to participate in their 500-mile, week-long campaign to raise awareness about the need for blood, marrow, organ, tissue and stem cell donations.
She joined 11 others, to start the tour in Canyon on Nov. 2. Their daily average is 100 miles between cities with their first stop in Lubbock.
After that, each succeeding day saw them in Snyder, Abilene, San Angelo and then finally in Fredericksburg. In each town, the riders presented testimonials about donation and how one person’s body can save an exponential number of others.
They ride in memory of donors and to honor their recipients. Each day, they select a Texan whose life was either saved or will be by organ/tissue donation and ride in honor of them.
Pipkin-Love rode for Brenda Lee. She received the heart of Casey Blanton, who died suddenly Aug. 24, 2014.
‘The ripple-effects of his gifts’
“Casey was 23 when he was tragically killed in San Antonio,” his mother, Rhonda, said Nov. 5 in Abilene. “He was able to save many lives.”
The group had stopped at McMurry. Rhonda, an Abilene resident, was there to meet them. Together, she and Pipkin-Love looked over a poster highlighting the wide spectrum of her son’s donations. Casey was a 2008 graduate of Jim Ned High School.
“It’s hard to comprehend the magnitude, the ripple-effect of his gifts,” Rhonda said. “And it’s comforting to know that he’s still out there. I mean, he’s still helping people.”
Organ transplants are the first thing many think of when it comes to tissue donation. But the truth is there is so much more that comes from a donor.
“Something I found out by contacting where (Casey) donated his tissues, bones and ligaments,” Rhonda said. “I didn’t realize until three years into our journey that they collected allografts at the time of his death, and they can use those up to five years later.”
Allografts are tissues received from a deceased or living donor that can be used in reconstructive surgery. It’s a useful alternative to using tissue taken from elsewhere on the patient’s body.
Even her son’s bones provided donor material. At first, she couldn’t picture how they’d be used if they weren’t a perfect fit for someone else.
“But it doesn’t work that way,” Rhonda explained. “They’re engineered, like for soldiers who have shattered bones.”
Giving thanks
It’s one thing to understand the gift her son gave to the world. It’s something else to see an example of it in Pipkin-Love.
“I appreciate Sarah raising awareness. It’s kind of neat to see the full circle,” Rhonda said. “She’s a recipient, and Casey is a donor.”
It’s a meaningful moment for Pipkin-Love, too.
“Sometimes we don’t know as recipients what to say because ‘Thank you’ seems like so little,” she told Rhonda. “But thank you for everything, and for making that decision.”
Rhonda returned her thanks, saying Casey had already made the decision, and that even as she arrived at the hospital on that fateful day, she could feel him urging her to stick with it.
“I could feel him, poking at me,” Rhonda said. “He still gives me that push, just like this today and all the other Donate Life events we do. It’s something I don’t want to do a lot of times.”
But she does it anyway. She can almost hear him.
‘He’s like, ‘Go on, Mom!’ And if I don’t want to do it, if I ignore that voice, it haunts me,” she said. “It’s just crazy to think about all the places he can be, and it’s bittersweet to know he’s still out there helping people.”
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