Advocates and Angels

By Richard A. Brown

The Wednesday before Memorial Day was a bit more hectic than usual in our house. With just nine days left in the school year, my daughter, Beth, needed a quick ride to high school. Her regular driver was a graduating senior, so he wouldn’t be going.

I threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and headed out the door, forgetting, for once, my pager. It had been my constant companion since mid-February when my name was added to the liver-transplant waiting list at the Lied Transplant Center in Omaha, Nebraska.

By the time I returned home I began focusing on the day ahead and the tasks awaiting me in my Herald House editorial office in the Temple at Community of Christ world headquarters in Independence. My wife, Sally, joined me in the kitchen. She was running early because of a before-school meeting at her elementary school. When the phone rang I assumed it was one of her fellow teachers. She answered it and a brief moment later handed the phone to me. Something was up.

“Richard, this is Joyce at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. We have a liver for you today.”

“Stunned” doesn’t begin to describe it.

As far as I knew I was still Status 3 on the list—not quite sick enough to move up to Status 2-b where I thought just about everybody had to be to get “the call.” With more than 17,000 Americans on the list and thousands more desperately trying to get on, I really didn’t think my turn would come soon. Some folks have to wait as much as two to five years before a good match becomes available. Sadly, about 40 percent of those listed don’t get a liver in time. There’s actually no shortage of livers, just “donor families” willing to sign a consent form. Too often they put off that discussion until they are huddled together behind a curtain in a hospital emergency room, overwhelmed with grief, disbelief, and tears.

Our pace quickened at home. Sally went to awaken our son, Matt, who had arrived home the previous weekend from his freshman year of university in Boston. He’d need to pick up Beth at school and help reschedule her final exams. I was on the house phone; Sally had the cell phone, another transplant-related addition to our lifestyle.

I called my brother Larry in Houston. He’s a registered nurse with extensive cardiac-care experience. He immediately vowed to drop everything and head to Omaha as quickly as airline schedules could get him there. It would take a few frequent-flyer miles, a long layover in Atlanta, and probably a good deal of “stubborn insistence” but he made it by late evening. He’d remain in Omaha for a week and a half.

Sally and I contacted our immediate-call list, and I moved to the computer to send one short e-mail message to family, friends, co-workers, and an online liver-support group. I paused briefly at the subject line: Transplant Time!

Sally is a consummate organizer and had begun her list of things we’d need for an extended stay away from home while driving back from the evaluation in February. And so two large plastic tubs filled with necessities were loaded in the van first. Still, that next hour was a blur, but by 9 o’clock we were ready to go. The four of us joined hands for an emotional prayer time, then she and I hit the road. The kids would follow in an hour or so. We knew we had up to six hours from receiving the call to arriving at the hospital. The drive northward against strong, gusty winds would take about four hours. It would be close.

Just before 1 o’clock I hurried in the hospital’s front door and was soon escorted to pre-op where I was surrounded by all kinds of medical people in green surgical scrubs. Good news: a final check on the liver, which had arrived around 10 a.m., showed it was a good one. As I had all morning long, I tried my best to push two questions to the back of my mind: What were we really getting into? What was happening with the unknown donor family? I could only whisper, “Lord, help us all.”

At 10 p.m., after seven hours in surgery, I was whisked away to the liver ICU. It would be many days later before I became fully aware of my family’s roller-coaster ride. Apparently my sense of humor wasn’t lost during surgery and even in a heavily medicated state that helped to “lighten the load.” Wish I could remember what I said. I’ve come to think of it an another of God’s many gifts to us during those difficult days.

Although the donor liver was a “perfect computer match,” it soon became apparent things were going wrong. Before nightfall Thursday my name was back on the national waiting list, this time as Status 1: Emergency. We had only a few days.

It was, of course, an awful time for my family and for an amazing and every-growing support network, connected largely by e-mail. Those folks really cared and were praying hard—and asking others to do so, too. I have no idea how many prayer chains and support groups remembered us. Some have since shared how they even altered their daily habits so they wouldn’t be too far from their computers and e-mail updates.

Saturday morning brought word a liver was on its way to Omaha. By that evening it was inside me beginning to do what healthy livers are supposed to do. I was hardly out of the woods—my kidneys had shut down and would require weeks of dialysis—but the signs gradually began to be more positive. By late Tuesday my condition had imporved enough for me to be moved from ICU to the special liver unit. Within a week I was moved to the Cooperative Care Unit.

The Sunday before my first transplant I had preached in my home congregation. That was a rarity due to my two-year battle with liver disease (after all this time the best diagnosis the doctors can come up with is cryptogenic cirrhosis, which simply means “of unknown cause”). I had used the suggested lectionary scripture from John 14. In that passage Jesus reassured his frightened disciples that although he was leaving to be with God in heaven, he would not abandon them but send “another Comforter…another Advocate.” First, they would know his “peace.”

Well-known author Bernie Siegal says coincidence is just God’s way of surprising us. He may be right. I thought I’d done a fairly good job tying that scripture passage to the idea that faith is both noun and veryb: the product of spiritual disciplines and the often irrational act of holding on, believing help was on the way. Most of those in the congregation already knew of our “walk through the valley.” Intellectually, at least, I thought it fit together. As the saying goes, my “talk” would soon turn into a “walk.”

As I write this a couple of weeks after my second transplant, I am healing a little bit more each day. My kidneys still aren’t working right but I’m doing more and more “normal stuff” daily. From the start there has been a “peace in my soul” that makes no rational sense other than as a gift from God.

I know that I have been richly blessed by the Advocate/Comforter just as Jesus promised. In my case the Holy Spirit brought care and guidance not only through highly skilled nurses and doctors but also through my wife and brother in particular. Even before I left ICU Larry insisted I learn to get out of bed and stand up without anybody’s help, then begin to walk. Sally quickly assumed her new role as my primary caregiver. Together they advanced the idea that healing meant something quite different from being waited on hand and foot.

As we receive personal messages from more and more of our “e-mail angels” I’ve realized something else. During this past year I’ve been part of the church’s name-change implementation atheadquarters. I can honestly say we’ve talked that subject to death and I’ve contributed my share of nice-sounding words to the Herald and other publications. It’;s only now, though, that I really know what a community of Christ can mean.

My story pales compared to others I’ve heard here. There’s the young mother whose three year old already has had two liver transplants, 112 blood transfusions, all but a few inches of intestines removed, and now is diagnosed with celiac sprue. Other people have had to expend as much energy fighting reluctant government agencies or private insurance companies as the diseases themselves. Some of these people have strong family and community ties; most are far from home for extended periods. Who will be their advocates, comforters, angels?

I’ve discovered an interesting thing about blessings: they tend to multiply and bounce in unexpected directions, affecting people far and wide. I can’t explain the “why” or the “how” of such blessings or the prayers that surround them, yet I know deep in my soul it somehow works.