By Chad Klassen

Kamloops family hoping to sign up more organ donors on Green Shirt Day

Apr 5, 2019 | 5:00 PM

KAMLOOPS — Saturday (Apr. 6) marks the one-year anniversary of the tragic Humboldt Broncos bus crash that killed 16 people.

The family of Broncos defenseman Logan Boulet turned their personal tragedy into Green Shirt Day, the first of which happens across the country on Sunday. 

While the 21-year-old died in the crash, he saved the lives of six people after his organs were donated. 

Kamloops native Tony Maidment knows what it’s like to have a second chance at life. He suffered through a rare liver disease for two decades, including six years on a wait list for a liver transplant. But Maidment finally received one on May 3, 2017, and life has been great ever since. 

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“My day-to-day, it’s level. It’s not up and down. It’s level,” said Maidment. “I get to wake up in the morning and do my day’s work, do what I want to do, not think, ‘Am I going to have a down day? Am I going to be sick today?’”

Maidment’s been able to get back on the bike and has participated in a couple of 10K runs, everything he used to do before getting sick. Maidment and his daughter Kennedie have been advocates for organ donation along the journey. 

This weekend, they are set up at McArthur Island for the home show, honouring the first Green Shirt Day and Boulet, who on his 21st birthday — five weeks before the bus crash — expressed his desire to donate his organs. 

“Green Shirt Day to me means to continue on what a young man has done and proven to everybody,” noted Maidment. “It’s a very easy thing to do, to give somebody else hope.”

Boulet’s organs were used to save six people’s lives, and his generosity inspired a nation to sign up as well — with nearly 100,000 registered donors in April 2018 alone. 

“Whereas they would’ve seen normally 3,000-to-5,000 in that time period, so tenfold of what we normally see,” said Kennedie, a board member with the Canadian Transplant Association. “And then just continuing the conversation. The Boulets always put it, ‘Make it kitchen table talk.’ Let your families know what your decisions are.”

Over the last year, Kennedie, a nurse in the intensive care unit at RIH, says more people talk about organ donation in the wake of a family tragedy. 

The number of organ donations in B.C. have continued to rise this past year. In 2018, 100,000 more British Columbian have registered. 

Tony and Kennedie hope to increase that number this weekend and beyond, hoping to carry on the legacy left behind by the Boulet family. 

“No words come to mind. Thank you is just not enough,” said Maidment towards the Boulet family. “To continue raising organ donor awareness, even after the tragedy that has happened to the Boulet family, there are no words. There really aren’t.”