Colby Salerno has been talked about on the news, in the newspapers, by word of mouth, and online. He has become famous from his story and his blog “Tales From The Tenth Floor.”

Who is Colby Salerno? You may be asking. Well, Colby is a 24 year old Cheshire resident with an inspiring story and a kind heart. He had a rare heart disease and needed a heart transplant as soon as he possibly could get one. He was on the “Transplant Waiting List” since he was 12 years old. The Transplant Waiting List is a list of people who need organ transplants, and Colby was #1 on it for many years. More and more people are added to the Transplant Waiting List each year, and around 100 people are already added each day! While this number is increasing, the number of Organ Donors is decreasing. This is not good news for people like Colby, and other people who need lifesaving transplants.

Since Colby was 12 years old, he was not like other kids. He couldn’t play sports too much, run, or have a normal life in general. Now, everything is turning around for him. A little less than a year ago, Colby was slowly dying in the Hartford Hospital, waiting for a heart transplant that nobody was ever sure he would get. Colby was the youngest man in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) waiting for a transplant at the time. He made friends with 2 older men that were also waiting for a heart transplant. What they needed were organ donations. An organ donation is something people decide when they get their drivers license and is when people donate their organs to people who desperately need them when you pass away. Saving a life and being an organ donor is extremely important!! If you can’t live your life anymore, why not donate to save a life?

I have already decided that I am going to be an organ donor when I’m older. My goal is to spread the word about organ donations so other people will do the same. I met Colby when I was 5 years old and he was just a teenager working at a summer day camp. He made an impact on me immediately with his personality and once I learned his story, he made even more of an impact. He showed me that organ donations are a very important thing to do because they save lives. They saved his life. Would you be willing to donate the organs you don’t need anymore after you pass away to save someones life?  If it’s easy, helpful and makes sense, then why don’t more people do it? That’s the thing I always wonder about. “Life is bittersweet at best,” Colby said in one of his blog posts. This is what I think of when I think about organ donations. It’s bitter because a loved one was lost, but it’s sweet because you get the proud feeling that you saved one or more peoples lives. If anything in this blog stuck with you, I hope it is that Colby Salerno is an inspiring role model and that organ donations are incredibly important, so you should be one when you get asked that question later on in life!

~Krista Sbordone