Over 2100 people have responded to a new online registry for organ, eye and tissue donation. Organ donor families and transplant recipients met at the legislature on Wednesday to celebrate the registry's successful launch.

Carolina Donor Services attributes the increase to a combination of the registry and the state's new Heart Prevails legislation making the heart on the driver's license a legal consent for organ donation. State Representative Dale Folwell of Winston Salem sponsored the legislation.

"Three point five million people in North Carolina have the heart on their driver's license and most of them thought that this meant they were an organ donor," he said. "Before the Heart Prevails legislation was passed and signed by the governor, no EMT worker, no police officer, no preacher, no family member, no trauma surgeon or no emergency room technician could rely on the heart as a first-person directive."

Folwell, who made the decision to donate his son's organs after an accident nine years ago, joined Emmitt Ray, father of UNC Mascot Jason Ray, in sharing their stories of donation.

"As we work our way through our grief and our misery, and then we see the benefits of the people that received the donation, it makes it all worthwhile," said Ray.

Ray told the group that the family has been fortunate to meet the four different people whose lives were saved by his son's organ donation. Another 120 people received tissue transplants from the college senior.

Karl Keyes, of Cary, shared his unique experience of being both a donor and recipient. Fifteen years after donating one of his kidneys to his brother, he suffered kidney failure and went on the donor list. He has not met the donor family, but knows his lifesaving transplant came from a young person who had died.

"It was difficult to know that in order for me to have this kidney, someone had to die," he said. "And it doesn't have to be that way because people can donate kidneys. You require just one to live."