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Thirty Years
She was a perfectly healthy kid. Which made it easier for everyone around her to live in denial. And that is exactly what we did — for the four years from the point in time she was diagnosed until the symptoms of the disease reared its ugly head.
We went to the transplant center then. Over 300 miles away, it would take seven hours to drive there. But where we lived, there were no other options. The hospitals that performed liver transplants on children were few and far between in those days. Little did we realize at the time, but I would come to know each and every twist and turn of that seven-hour drive with alarming familiarity.
In the end, she waited on the list for exactly two months. Criteria were different back then, in the early days of transplant surgery. PELD and MELD scores hadn’t been invented yet. When an organ was offered to a center, the surgical team made the best decision possible to place that organ where it would do the most good.
So on September 8th, we found ourselves waiting in the ICU waiting room for eleven hours while our older daughter underwent the liver transplant that would save her life. We had a lot of time to think in those hours. We thought about what life would look like in the post-transplant world. We thought about our younger daughter, over 300 miles away at home, in the…
