Welcome to our Team Pittsburgh Website!

On behalf of ALL the members of Team Pittsburgh, it very exciting to have the opportunity to share information about the 2004 U.S. Transplant Games, information about our athletes and donor family members, and preparation for the upcoming Games from July 27-August 1, 2004 in the beautiful city of Minneapolis Minnesota on this, our premiere website! 

As the team’s managers, Shelley Zomak and I, Judi Vensak, are honored to share this experience with our friends and heroes…the team.  We have both spent almost 20 of our individual nursing careers in cardiac and pulmonary transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.

With this very unique and special connection to patients waiting and having had organ transplants, we are very motivated to spread the word of the dire need or organ donation to our region through our volunteerism with the National Kidney Foundation, leaders in organ donor awareness. 

Caring for candidates and recipients of organ transplants has greatly humbled our own lives.  We have learned that life IS the most precious gift and we’ll not take that for granted, not for one moment.  We’ve heard so many families say the words “we never imagined it (end-stage organ failure) would affect our family”, “he/she was the picture of health, I just cannot believe this is happening” as they dealt with an uncertain future for their family or loved ones.  Opposite this, are the recipients who are so grateful and feel so lucky that another person or family, one they do not know, was so generous to have made the life-saving decision of organ donation to give them a chance at living again. 

Then there are the U.S. Transplant Games. 

In 2000, Shelley and I were attending the professional component of the bi-annual event, the “Transitions in Transplantation” Conference.  With it entitled us spectatorship of the 2000 U.S. Transplant Games held on the athletic venues of Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, FL.  Within the first minutes of the Opening Ceremonies of those Games, we were engulfed in emotion.  Overwhelming joy and admiration for all those organ recipient athletes, children and adults, and their families as well as the families of those donors who were recipients of a 16 minute standing ovation of over 16, 000 participants.

With this experience, we move on.  2004 marks the 50^th anniversary of organ transplantation itself.  Imagine how far modern medicine has come from a time when many diseases meant the certainty of death, and today, through organ and bone marrow transplantation, people are living and celebrating and gathering in athletic competition at events like the incredible U.S. Transplant Games!

Heartfelt thanks for your interest and support,

Judi Vensak, RN, Team Manager
Shelley Zomak, RN, Assistant Team Manager