Loving Life

"We have no qualms about the sport or anything. She loved it. We loved going to watch her and everything. She was tackled and she hit the ground head first and the report that we got from a couple of her friends that were there that were watching at the time, she hit the ground awkwardly, her head and neck taking the biggest part of the impact and she actually did sit up for they said like one or two seconds, kind of put her hand to the side of her head and then she fell back and was unconscious and she never regained consciousness after that."
"When we made the decision to stop intervention on Saturday, it was very easy for us to transition into going through the process of donating her organs, because that is exactly what she wanted to have done."
"She already has, we found out this morning, helped at least six other people and their families, because of her gifts." Kidneys to Sick Children's Hospital in Toronto, lungs to a young woman in Toronto, pancreas to Toronto, liver to London, Ontario.
"And her heart stayed here in Ottawa -- which was nice to hear."
Gordon Stringer

Rowan Stringer, seventeen years old, a grade 12 student at John McCrae Secondary School had already been accepted into the nursing program at the University of Ottawa for this coming fall. Sunday night was her last day of life. On May 8, during a home game in Ottawa, she sustained grave injuries during a school rugby match. She was John McRae High School's team captain. Following her older sister who also loved to play rugby at the school.

  Contributed/Facebook Rowan Stringer, 17, moves the ball ahead during a game in the summer of 2012

She had suffered traumatic brain injury. It was compounded by head injuries she had sustained only days before in during an earlier game, ahead of the game played on Wednesday. The theory is that the earlier injury may have been an add-on factor to the second, final injury. "You know how kids are, they want to go, they want to play, especially when they're competitive, and they're not going to go telling their coaches that they're not 100%", explained her father during an interview.

As a result of the prognosis of her condition, given to her parents by doctors at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario, they decided to forego further medical intervention. It was explained that the chance of recovery even if treatment continued was very small, said her father. Even if his daughter rallied and managed to have her condition improve, it seemed very likely that she would have experienced, after that, a very poor quality of life. A dreadful message for doctors to deliver, a dread message for parents to have to accept.

"We knew that she would never want to live like that, so that made our decision to go through the organ donation process very easy. Even though it's a really hard time when you're going through something like this, it's important to think about something like that because something really good can come out of something so horrible that's happened to you.  She loved life", her father said. "She called her bruises her badges of honour. She'd post them on Facebook and was quite proud of the fact that she got banged up. We had no qualms about her playing at all."

The intriguing question here is what would this 17-year-old girl have decided for herself, had she been able to communicate before all further medical intervention ceased. Would she have loved life enough to venture to discover what she might have gained from it even while incapacitated? And, knowing how, on the rare but blessed occasion, doctors' prognoses can be wrong for a particular patient, might it have been possible that she could survive her ordeal and endure a process of rehabilitation?

That's the thing about the finality of death. No one will ever know.

A horrible occurrence indeed, quite unforeseen and dramatically, and quite uncompromisingly final. A young life taken by an untoward incident, action taken as part of a game. No fault can be attributed. Fate and fortune, circumstances and accidental outcome. A family left shattered. In a cesspit of utter disbelief and grief.