The 12-year-old soft-spoken girl who loves the color pink will tell you that, and so will her mom, Carol “Jenny” McCorkle.And they have a stranger’s family to thank.Claire, 12, celebrates two months on June 18 with a new heart — a heart she received from an organ donor.“It means a lot to me that someone wanted to donate their child’s organ to me,” said Claire, who added she feels “a lot” better than before the transplant.McCorkle, 38, at times choking up, described how her daughter was near death, suffering from restrictive cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart muscle is scarred and causes it to become stiff, prohibiting the heart chambers to properly fill with blood.It can also lead to other problems in other organs, including the lungs, if the blood backs up, said Dr. Richard G. Ohye, Claire’s surgeon and head of the University of Michigan’s Pediatric Cardiovascular Surgery Division and the surgical director of the Pediatric Heart Transplant Program.“I was at my daughter’s death bed a month ago,” McCorkle said during an interview a few weeks ago in the family’s temporary home in a Flint Township mobile home park.

“Now she’s alive and thriving because someone chose to give her the gift of life.”The McCorkles, Claire especially, are encouraging others to become organ donors, like most of the McCorkles’ family and friends now are.“I want to help save other children and I want to help them save their lives,” said Claire, who loves her pink cowboy boots and taking care of her tiny Chihuahua puppy, Chloe, who also wears a pink collar with bling. The family plans to write a letter to the Gift of Life of Michigan organization in hopes it can connect them with the donor’s family.“I want to meet them because they gave me my life,” she said. “They saved my life. I want to show them what they did. I want to be a part of their life. I want to know who they saved.”Before the transplant, Claire spent much of her time in a wheelchair. She was tired and often was out of breath.Now, she can run and bound up and down stairs to feed Chloe.“I want to get into doing some soccer and basketball,” she said.

“I wanted to do piano lessons. Piano is my favorite instrument.”The McCorkle family was uprooted from their home in Sault Ste. Marie when they got a call in spring 2009 from Claire’s cardiologist in Marquette that he had made a mistake in her diagnosis and that she needed to be seen by the cardiologist team at the University of Michigan.She was put on the heart transplant list in May 2009 and the family needed to be within a three hour’s drive of Ann Arbor for when a heart came.Puppies For Sale In Lancaster CaliforniaSo they moved downstate and lived for months at the Ronald McDonald House near the hospital, then in an extended stay hotel and in December moved into the mobile home off Pasadena Avenue.Claire had been prepped for transplant surgery once before — a few weeks before her April transplant — but found out the heart wasn’t good. Shih Poo Puppies On Long Island

She was sent home to wait.Then, she got sicker and was admitted to the hospital.McCorkle thinks Claire was born with heart problems but had been misdiagnosed for years.Best Rooftop Bars Nyc YelpMedical staff had to perform CPR on Claire when she was born and at 2, she’d been diagnosed with asthma. At age 5, she was put on oxygen and her parents kept taking her to doctors, who said she just had breathing troubles.But Claire wasn’t like other boys and girls her age.“She never ran,” McCorkle said. “She only walked very slowly. When Claire was 10, she spent 10 days in the hospital with the blood infection sepsis and doctors finally diagnosed her with a heart condition, though one that wasn’t supposed to require surgery, McCorkle said.Claire has missed more than two years of school because of her illness and has been working with staff through the Carman-Ainsworth School District to try to catch up on work.

The hope is that Claire will be able to catch up enough over the summer to began sixth grade in the fall, just a year behind where she should be.While Claire has a slim scar on her chest and takes some 20 pills a day, Claire is now “12 again,” McCorkle said.Since the surgery, Claire’s gained weight and added about two inches to her height.The McCorkles are hoping to maybe move back to Sault Ste. Marie after Claire has another heart biopsy in August, something she has to periodically do to make sure her body isn’t rejecting her heart.“It’s not a cure,” Ohye explained of Claire’s surgery. “The average lifespan of the organ is probably (for) someone Claire’s age, is probably 15 years.”But Ohye said Claire, with her new heart, has no limitations on activity, except maybe high impact sports.Ohye also stressed the need for more donor awareness.“That’s why these kids die waiting is because of lack of donors,” he said, adding some may be taken off the transplant list if their problems damage other organs too much.

In 2009, Michigan organ donors helped with 864 transplants, saving hundreds of lives, according to Gift of Life Michigan.At the end of May, hundreds of people in Michigan were waiting on transplant lists for more than 3,000 organs, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. More than 2,460 people are waiting for a kidney, followed by 351 people who need livers and 88 people who need new hearts.In Michigan, about 1.7 million are registered organ donors. , call (800) 482-4881 or visit a Secretary of State branch. > houses for sale in Sault Ste. Marie Get an alert with the newest ads for houses for sale in Sault Ste. Marie. houses for saleSault Ste. Marie.Edit: We have a video version available. Click here to see a hilarious video summary of the 10 most redneck cities in Michigan. Is there anything really wrong with being called a Michigan redneck? It’s a part of our culture. Rednecks are hailed as being great in our song lyrics.

They’re prominently featured in reality television. There are even video games about rednecks. So, you’d think people who are rednecks would be proud to be called a redneck.What is a redneck anyways? Well, according to the official bible of literature, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a redneck is: “A white person who lives in a small town or in the country especially in the southern U.S., who typically has a working-class job, and who is seen by others as being uneducated and having opinions and attitudes that are offensive.” Plus, we thought why not add in a few stereotypes? Cause, you know, rednecks like to hunt, fish, drink, smoke and shoot things. And shop at Walmart. Using that criteria, it’s not hard to scrape the internet, run some scientific data on where the most members of the Michigan redneck family tree most likely live. Because, the data never lies, does it? So, hold our beers and watch this. After analyzing all cities with a decent amount of people in them, we came up with this list as The Most Redneck Cities in Michigan:

Many of these are the types of places where people have deer horns on their hoods and where people wear camo to church. Michigan rednecks are different than rednecks of the south. They’re more into the outdoors. Read on below to see where your town ranked. In order to rank the most redneck cities in Michigan, we had to determine what criteria makes a redneck. We threw a lot of criteria at this one in order to get the best, most complete results possible. Using Yelp and Google Maps, this is the criteria we used: Note: For the sake of getting reliable numbers, we counted places within a city’s border, as well as within a short driving distance. High school graduation rate: 73% Walmart rank: 6th in Michigan Mobile home parks per capita: 12th in the stateYou have the official bragging rights as being named the most redneck city in the entire state of Michigan. You may now brag to your friends and share this endlessly on your Facebook walls. Sturgis is located way down on the Indiana state line.

And when you look at the data, it’s clear that the place is crawling with rednecks. Sturgis ranks 12th in the state for mobile home parks per capita, and has plenty of places to get fishing bait. Like a lot of Michigan, there are tons of spots in the area to fish and hunt. Sturgis might not be your first choice for deer and turkey hunting, but since it’s so isolated, you can bet there are tons of buck and tom tags filled each fall down there. And, when you consider that 1 out of 4 people here didn’t finish high school, it’s clear. Sturgis is redneck central. Edit: Due to popular demand, we now have Sturgis is #1 Redneck City in Michigan t shirts! Click here to get a men’s and click here to get a women’s. Fishing stores per capita: 1st Mobile home parks: 2nd in Michigan It was close, Utica, but you were edged out by Sturgis. But when you look at the sheer number of rednecky things in Utica, you can imagine that everyone who lives here must be a redneck.

Utica ranks first in the state for fishing/bait shops in the area, and has a chew factor of 1. Meaning there are more tobacco stores in the Utica area than anywhere else, per capita, in the state. Utica rednecks are more city folk – the ones who are likely to shop at Dollar General and Walmart. It’s just outside of the northern suburbs of Detroit. However, there are also several mobile home parks in the area, too. Can you think of a more redneck friendly place in Michigan? You have your cheap living, cheap groceries, plenty of bars, and a few good fishing spots. When did a ‘No Fishing’ sign ever stop a determined redneck? Gun stores per capita: 4th in Michigan Fishing/bait shops per capita: 11th in the state High school graduation rank: 75% Niles is way down on the Indiana state line as well. Meaning the southern Michigan border might be redneck row. Here, rednecks have lots of places to buy guns, ammo and fishing gear. And it makes sense;

the St. Joseph River goes right through town, making it easy to fly fish for steelhead and salmon. Just think, Niles residents. Only 3 out of 4 of you graduated high school. Had you studied even less, you might have ranked higher on this list. A real redneck is out mudding, fishing and blowing things up. Not sitting in math class on a Wednesday morning. High school graduation rate: 80% Guns and ammo per capita: 12th in Michigan Fishing/bait per capita:9th in the state There’s some Yooper love. In fact, you’ll find that several cities in the U.P. are coming up. No one is going to argue that it’s not redneck central up there. In Sault Ste. Marie, there’s obviously lots of fishing and hunting opportunities, as is evident in the number of gun and fishing places up there. Rednecks are free to pretty much do whatever they want in this part of the state. And they damn near do just that. High school graduation rate: 78% Mobile home parks: 6th in Michigan

Dollar stores per capita: 10th A town named Three Rivers is most likely going to be crawling rednecks. There’s obviously plenty of fishing nearby. And plenty of places to buy cheap bait. Rednecks here have it made. They can sit on their back decks, throw back a case of Busch Lights and stick their poles in the water, all while listening to the Michigan-Michigan State game on the dial. It might be redneck heaven down here. High school graduation rate: 79% Fishing/bait shops per capita: 12th Bars per capita: 13th in the state Port Huron is a very white city where we should refer to the people here as rednecks with paychecks, because they are far more successful than their redneck peers across the rest of the state. Many of the rednecks here probably have the nicer Chevys and Fords, and maybe even have a boat. They are most likely the rednecks who take weekend trips out on Lake Huron. The Canadians who live across the bridge from Port Huron probably have a puzzled look when a nice boat pulls by with a bunch of beer toting, country music blaring Michigan rednecks in it.

Walmart rank: 3rd in Michigan Gun stores per capita: 12th Bars per person: 10th in the state You Houghton rednecks have it all figured out don’t you? You got a little bit of everything way up there. Places to get gear and tackle, guns and ammo, and a Walmart all to your very own. No lines for cheap bait and doe urine! There are also several area bars up here where Houghton rednecks can sit around and speculate on when rut’s gonna hit. It’s the type of redneck place where each bar has a running total on who shot the most deer that fall.You have no chance up here. Fishing/bait shops per capita: 2nd in Michigan Bars per capita: 4th in the state Dollar Store rank: 5thYou sure do know how to redneck it up, don’t you? This is the type of place where rednecks let their bird dogs roam free and they probably come back with their own dinner. Iron River is a teeny speck in what might be the most rural and highly concentrated area of redneckness in the entire state.

There’s endless fishing and hunting up here, and chances are, you can probably fill your moose tag on opening day from a stand in your own back yard. Actually, these are rednecks we’re talking about. They have deer stands up in their front yards in Iron River. Bars per capita: 7th in Michigan Gun stores per capita: 5th in the state If you were a redneck born in Iron Mountain, you could spend your entire life within a short truck drive away from Iron Mountain and never even need to see the outside world. You may not even know that a world outside of Iron Mountain redneckness even existed. Why would a redneck ever leave? You have everything a redneck could ever wish for right at your finger tips in Iron Mountain Except a Golden Corral. You’d have to drive all the way to Wisconsin to get that. All you can eat catfish fritters and spuds? “Jump in the truck, kiddo, you ain’t seen anything like this.” Fishing/bait stores per capita: 12th in the state

Owosso is a short drive west of Flint, where it’s 97% white, and a very blue collar crowd. There’s plenty of places to get chew, bait and Walmart exists here. The rednecks here are far, far different than those in the U.P. In fact, if you dropped an Owosso redneck off in the middle of the Upper Peninsula, he’d be lost without his Dollar General and trailer parks. According to the official dictionary definition of a redneck, and based on stereotypes that the internet says are true, using science to determine the most redneck cities in a state can’t be too far off. If you’re analyzing smaller cities in Michigan with blue collar workers, where people have lots of options for drinking, fishing, hunting and Walmarting, this is an accurate list. If you’re curious enough, here are the least redneck places in Michigan: We also wrote a story on the worst places to live in Michigan if you haven’t seen it yet. Click here to read it. Edit: We have a video version available.