Angel Shared His Name

When 18-year-old Johnny Bender fought for his life after a car crash in rural Indiana, another Johnny Bender in Anaheim also was struggling to survive.

Because one Johnny Bender died, another is alive today.

In his death, the younger Bender gave a distant cousin with the same name the donation of life. The teen’s liver was packed in ice and flown on a chartered plane to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where doctors transplanted the organ.

That the older Bender even found a liver--much less from a relative and one with the same name, no less--was a long shot. Despite continued campaigns, liver donors are few and far between.

“To be on a donor list for two weeks and to have everything come through, it’s just quite miraculous,” said John Bender, known as Johnny to his Indiana relatives. The 62-year-old father of three and grandfather of 10, general contractor and cabinetmaker was recuperating in his Anaheim home last week.

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The number of people in the United States who need livers increases 20% to 30% a year, but the number of donors goes up only 1% to 3%, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

Relatives are considered first before any other prospective recipients. There are 4,527 transplants a year and 15,706 people awaiting the operation, according to the network.

Christopher R. Shackleton, director of Cedars-Sinai Center for Liver and Kidney Diseases and Transplantation, said the California Bender was “very, very lucky,” because, “we summoned him from his home. Most of the recipients are very sick in the hospital by the time a donation comes through.”

John Bender felt fatigued and looked pale, but otherwise felt fine when doctors told him in January that hepatitis C had deteriorated his organ so much that he would not survive without a transplant. On June 19, the day his cousin died, he received a telephone call at 5 a.m. explaining that Jonathon, also called Johnny, had survived only a week after a car crash.

The call came after a relative who had visited John Bender in Anaheim remembered that the older man was ill with hepatitis and needed a liver.

In fact, the teen, a worker in a mobile home factory who was an avid guitar player and songwriter, had met his namesake several years earlier at a family reunion.

The two are second cousins; the Indiana Bender’s father was a first cousin to the California Bender.

After scads of calls across the country, the liver was put on a plane and John Bender was rushed to the Los Angeles hospital for his operation. As he was wheeled into the operating room, he talked with his wife, Elizabeth, about what she should do if he didn’t make it through the risky operation, which requires the doctor to maneuver around key blood vessels and other organs.

“He’s in great condition now,” Shackleton said. “We just saw him . . . and he’s up and walking around.” Doctors have told Bender he could live 20 to 30 more years.

Even so, the transplant wasn’t easy. And the operation put him and relatives in California and Indiana on an emotional roller coaster, grieving for the loss of a teenager while rooting for the extended life of the Anaheim man.

Esther Bender, the teen’s mother, had trouble signing the organ donor forms, said her brother, Joe Stutzman.

“Giving up the little of him that was left was a hard decision,” he said. “We talked to her about how Johnny’s organs would perish anyway. This way, there would be life being given.”

And he read to her from the New Testament: “Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

“I told her, ‘Johnny would have laid down his life for his friends.’ That was his nature.”

Relatives reminded her of another woman in their rural town of Middlebury, population 2,000, whose son had died. A man had appeared at her door one day, saying he was alive because he had her son’s heart.

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When Esther Bender finally signed, she donated not only her son’s liver, but also his eyes, heart, lungs and kidneys to others.

John Bender said he didn’t know how to thank her. He asked his group from the First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton to send cards and flowers not to him, but to Esther.

Esther, 43, is still grieving, but Stutzman said she is cheered by the prospect of visiting John Bender in California soon.

Esther and John Bender now tell friends to plan for organ donation.

“It would be a shame to put organs into the ground,” John Bender said. “Out of a tragedy, something good can come.”