Giving the gift of life

Times Reporter 

 

To give the gift of life is the most precious gift of all, but some people may never know just how much their decisions are truly appreciated. It was 20 years ago, on Feb. 6, 1993, when Colleen Best received a liver transplant that saved her life. 

“All they told us was the organ was donated by a family. There had been a car accident in Kelowna and the family had agreed to donate the organs. I don’t know if they donated more or not,” said Best.

Neither the patient nor the donating family learn the identities of the other. Things are kept confidential to respect the privacy of both parties.

In 1991 Best had been a single mom who was running a daycare out of her home. One day she began feeling ill, she had pains in her abdomen and was often fatigued. She was 39 at the time. 

“My family doctor told me that I was in end stage liver disease which just threw me because end stage you think what the heck. So I went straight to the library and I looked it up and I think they said usually that gives you a range of about five years,” said Best. 

“He didn’t say anything about transplant at the time, he just said that was the diagnosis and they would do more testing.”

The cause of the liver disease was Hepatitis C. Best had gotten Hepatitis C when she was quite young. It become chronic, which happens to about three per cent of affected people, and it ate away at her slowly. 

When she first began to feel ill she knew could no longer run her daycare, and so Best made the decision to go back to school to find a sit down job. She had applied to Douglas College in British Columbia to take a community support worker program before receiving her diagnosis. 

“So I’m thinking what do I do, do I try and go ahead and do this, or do I just quit everything and just be sick. So I went to college,” said Best. 

It was later in that same year when she found out she had Esophageal Varices, which is caused by liver failure and can cause internal bleeding. After doctors repaired the problem, Best was sent to a specialist. 

“He said the Esophageal Varices would kill me before my liver failed. So the big rush was because of the Varices, and the only thing that they could do to stop that Varices was give me a transplant,” said Best.

“Just before that I had met Earl. He had three kids, I had two kids and he knew I was sick but he didn’t know what was wrong. He came with me to this appointment where they talked to me about the transplant. I knew at that point this is where he’s either going to say bye-bye or he’s going to stick with me. He said he wanted to marry me, so we kind of did this journey together.”

She had no family nearby, other than her children, to help her through it. Her mom and dad had died previously and the rest of her family was back east. Between Earl’s love and support, and the support from the church the family made do.

By this time Best was beginning to get boils, she would bruise easily and her blood sugar levels were affected. She was still in college when she had another Esophageal Varices episode. This time she was given a pager and told she was on the transplant waiting list. 

“We went through a few months of that, and that was interesting because every time the pager went off you think this is it,” said Best. 

Once a week the hospital would test the pager to make sure it was working, so that would be one false alarm, and then there could be wrong numbers coming in. The pager went off too many times, bringing with it at first a sense of hope, and then disappointment when it wasn’t the call they were waiting for. 

She had the pager for eight months, and was told she had one of the longest waits for an organ. So much was happening in her life at that time. There were the five kids who ranged from ages 7 to 14-years-old. She and Earl had gotten married almost a year earlier, she had finished college, and in January had begun working at the Burnaby School District. It was in February when the call came in.  

“You expect it to go through the pager because you’ve got this stupid thing, and you think that’s how you’re going to find out, but we were laying in bed and heard the phone ring and Earl said this is it, he just knew,” said Best. 

“Our oldest daughter answered the phone, we could hear her, and said ‘I’m sorry she’s sleeping…I said she’s sleeping…oh, oh just a minute,’ she came running down with the phone.”

It was around lunchtime on February 6, 1993 when Earl and Colleen Best walked into the Vancouver General Hospital. They saw the helicopter land and the courier carrying the ice box with her new organ. The surgical team prepped her, and she and Earl had a prayer together to calm each other before saying goodbye. 

Saying goodbye at the operating room doors was one of the toughest things for Best, she felt vulnerable and exposed. 

“You don’t know if you’re going to wake up here or there, and what you’re leaving behind, are you going to come back to it. It’s so big,” said Best.

“I went in to surgery, and I wasn’t scared of the surgery which was interesting, it was just such a big deal, I think the biggest thing was Earl and the kids.”

She had also been told sometimes the surgical team begins the procedure only to find the donated organ is damaged in some way. The patient is then sewn back up and continues to sit on the waiting list. Surgery began late in the afternoon. Earl was sent home to the kids after being told it was going to be a long one. 

“He came back in the morning and the first thing I heard was his voice talking to a nurse and so I knew that I was here,” said Best. 

Seeing someone after a transplant can be tough. There are tubes and wires coming out of every where it seems, a wall of monitors and people sitting at the end of the bed monitoring. No one prepared Earl for what he would be walking in to.  

When Best first opened her eyes she wasn’t able to talk because of a tube in her throat, so Earl handed her a piece of paper and pencil. What she was trying to get across was do I have a new liver but on paper it looked like an N with a squiggle to an E and then to a W, but that was enough for Earl to know what she was asking. She had a new liver, and she was going to survive. 

“I don’t think the family that donates the organ can hardly realize how appreciative (you are) and what a difference it makes to our whole family. It was life and death. I sent a card through the transplant society to get to them, but even a card doesn’t express the appreciation, the gratitude you have every single day, every day you wake up grateful to be there and it’s because of that family,” said Best. 

“You really do learn to appreciate every moment and make the best of every moment because it can be taken from you pretty quickly.”

Some people can’t accept the thought of somebody else being a part of them, but for Best it is something she embraces and sees as the gift and blessing that it is. 

When she had her transplant the longest living liver transplant recipient was 20 years, a mark she has beaten this year. There are some complications, she doesn’t have a good immune system and she can’t fight bacterial infections very well. Viral infections seem to drag on, but otherwise she is pretty healthy. 

Ten years after her transplant she was told the new liver was being affected by the Hepatitis C. Having another transplant wasn’t an option, but there was a new trial drug called Pegatron that they could try. Best had to get shots for a year, and she said it was almost like a mild chemotherapy. She lost her hair, and lost a lot of weight, had sores and nausea. 

“It wasn’t fun but at the end of the year I was clear, clean and I don’t have Hepatitis C,” said Best. 

Every six months Best visit the transplant unit, and she goes for regular check ups with her doctor. This year she and Earl put a thank you ad in the Kelowna newspaper, thanking the unknown family who donated the liver. 

“I don’t know why I got lucky because there are a lot of people who just don’t get the organs,” said Best. 

“For me that one organ has affected 22 people directly. It does give you a greater appreciation, you have a new lease on life and you tend to push as much as you can into a day as you can.”

There are many people who die waiting for a transplant, and even though you may have an organ donor card in your wallet, ultimately it is up to the family whether or not your organs will actually be harvested. 

“The real message is awareness, you need to think of it ahead of time so that if you are ever in the position where you have to make that decision, would you donate your loved ones organs that you can automatically say yes without giving it a lot of thought, because once you start thinking about it, it could get a little gruesome,” said Best. 

According to the Canadian Society of Transplantation, more than 4,000 Canadians are waiting for a transplant to save their lives. Last year only 1,803 transplants were performed, and 195 patients died while waiting.