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Man's Organs Give Life To Transplant Patients
Photo from Boloyan family
From left, David Eaton, Myron Boloyan and his brother Carl Boloyan work on the 1930 Model A Ford Speedster Myron was driving at the time of his death. Myron's family donated his organs after his death.
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Published: February 13, 2008
Lucky is, indeed, lucky. A former stray, the kitten named Lucky now has a home.
Lucky's guardian, Joyce Boloyan, tells the story of how her son, Myron John Boloyan, found Lucky last September. He gave the cat to Joyce to keep in her Port Richey home, just as he had rescued strays when he was a child.
Joyce cuddles Lucky, holding on to her one last moment, as if reluctant to let go of the kitten, who provides a link to her son.
Myron, a New Port Richey resident, has been dead for almost two months, killed in a car crash on Little Road in December. Myron was thrown from his car during the crash.
His close-knit family can almost get through a conversation about Myron without someone crying.
Almost but not quite. His widow, Sherri, chokes up when describing how Feb. 5 would have been her husband's 40th birthday.
Joyce becomes tearful when describing all the ways in which her son loved life.
He crammed it full of family, cars and art. And in his last act, he gave life to others.
Two people received Boloyan's organs, according to a letter to Sherri Boloyan from LifeLink Foundation, the nonprofit organ and tissue recovery organization in Tampa.
A 54-year-old Florida man received Myron's liver and left kidney. A 47-year-old man from Illinois got the right kidney.
His family clings to the thought of the life Myron gave to two others.
The gift of his organs mirrors one that was made to him about eight years ago. He was the recipient of a cornea and retina transplant then. The transplant didn't take, leaving him blind in one eye.
But Myron always remembered the donor and said he would want to do the same.
That was the kind of person he was. He always thought of others.
"He'd do anything in the world to help someone if he could," Joyce recalls.
In response to his warm heart, 350 people showed up at his funeral.
Myron was also a talented artist.
He loved to draw and paint in school but found his artistic outlet working with metal. He tamed it, bending it into the shapes of the fishes in the waters of his beloved Gulf of Mexico. His metal creatures looked as if they were ready to sail through life on languid waters.
But their creator preferred getting through it on wheels.
Cars were his passion and his job. He worked at C & C Body Shop, in Port Richey, where he did body work and sheet metal fabrication.
When he graduated from high school in Waterford, Mich., the only graduation present he wanted was his parents' 1966 Mustang.
Restoring the classic pony car took him five years but the work was worth it. He transformed it into a sleek, yellow convertible that earned a two-page color spread and cover inset in Super Ford magazine.
He was in one of his beloved cars the day he died. For about a year, he had worked with his dad, Myron George Boloyan, on a 1930 Model A Ford Speedster, building the automobile from scratch using old Ford parts.
The car was totaled in the wreck, but the garage where it was built is busy once again. Myron George and Carl Boloyan, Myron John's brother, are working on the go-cart the younger Myron was building for his only child, 9-year-old Alicia, when he died.
Something of Myron will live on in that cart, but that doesn't stop wife Sherri from missing him terribly.
"There's not another Myron in this world," she says.
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