Turning Tragedies into Miracles

s a firefighter for the City of Hialeah’s Fire Rescue Department, Michael Osorio immediately knows whose life he has saved. As the quality assurance manager and emergency medical services liaison for the Miller School of Medicine’s Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency (LAORA), Osorio may never know whose life he has touched—because he touches hundreds.

LAORA obtains organs for clinical transplantation throughout Southeast Florida and transports them to transplant centers all over the country. Last year LAORA retrieved organs from 115 donors, which led to more than 583 transplants, 311 of those at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Osorio has been with the agency since 1997. After graduating from Broward Community College, he began his first job as an organ perfusionist. Osorio traveled with the teams that procured organs such as kidneys, livers, hearts, and intestines, packaged and stored the organs, and helped transport them to Jackson. Osorio, a trained paramedic, had no background in organ transportation—“it was on-the-job training,” he says.

In his current position, Osorio is responsible for both ensuring Life Alliance’s regulatory compliance and for promoting the benefits of transplantation among South Florida fire departments. “Firefighters are admired by adults and children alike, and their outward support of organ and tissue donation serves as a catalyst for educating the communities they serve about the critical need for organs and the exponential number of people who will die without a transplant,” Osorio explains. One organ and tissue donor can save or improve up to 50 lives.

“It can be difficult to realize that in order for one person who needs a transplant to survive, another person has to die. But why not turn an unavoidable tragedy into a miracle, not just for one person but for many others,” says Osorio.

“I know that saving lives is what I was meant to do. Look into the eyes of a 1-year-old child who just received a heart transplant. If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is.”