Organ recipients form team to realize donor's basketball dreams
During a recent WCBA All-Star Game, a special competition was played between an amateur team and All-Star players.
The unusual basketball team consisted of three men in their 50s, a 22-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl, and they all claimed they were one person, People's Daily reported.
The story behind the team touched a nation, because all of the team were organ recipients from one person — a boy called Ye Sha.
Ye died from a cerebral hemorrhage on April 27, 2017 when he was just 16. His parents decided to donate his organs including his heart, lungs, liver, two kidneys and a pair of cornea which, eventually, helped seven strangers. Five of them formed the "one-man-team" in Ye's name to fulfill the boy's basketball dreams.
Their team uniform was printed with Ye's name and the organ they've received from the boy. Their uniform numbers — 20, 1, 7, 4 and 27 — symbolized the day Ye donated his organs.
"We are all Ye Sha and Ye Sha is also us," Zhou Bin, a team member who received Ye's liver, said.
The team members also decided to get together every April 27 to commemorate the boy who gave them all a new chance at life.
There are many people in China donating their organs, like Ye, but the nation still faces a shortage because of the large population and huge number of patients.
In China, about 300,000 patients need organ transplants each year, while only 16,000 are given the change to receive organs.
Huang Jiefu, director of the China National Organ Donation and Transplantation Committee, hopes more effort will be paid across society to the promotion of organ donation to benefit more patients.