About Lisa (the Recipient)

As I sit here on a Sunday morning, hoping that my children will not have any more diarrhea today (yuck!) the events of the past year are still unbelievable to me.  For those of you who don’t know me, I am a 44 yo single woman, grew up in St. Paul, MN, and now live in Denver.  I have always wanted to be a mom, and when the right guy was not available, decided I could and should do it on my own.  When I was 39, I decided to adopt a baby from China. I found an agency, did all my paperwork and had everything to China in 2006.  Then I waited, and waited, and waited.  The China adoption trail had gone cold.  After 3 years, I decided to look into other options and decided to get pregnant with the assistance of  IVF.

I should mention that I am a physician, and my day job is as a vice president with WellPoint (trying to work within the system to do GOOD things for people and will write something about that one day) but I also work (or did and will again) in a high-risk obstetric clinic.  I am an internal medicine physician but did a fellowship specializing in medical complications in pregnancy.  So, naturally, I figured my pregnancy would be a bad one.  I was right, but not in my wildest dreams would I have imagined this!

The IVF process was full of ups and downs, as those of you who have been through it know, but compared to some, it was actually fairly smooth (and expensive) for me.  In early April, while sitting in an airport, I learned that my pregnancy test was positive – make that VERY positive.  Gulp.  An ultrasound a few days later confirmed my suspicion – twins! Wow.  Most of my pregnancy was actually uneventful and went really well.  I felt great, went on a last fling vacation with my friend Christine going to see U2 in London and Glasgow, and then a great tour of Scotland and Croatia.  At 30 weeks developed pretty severe swelling (edema) but my blood pressure did not go up, I didn’t have protein in my urine, and the babies looked great on ultrasound.

Monday, we went to the ultrasound appointment and right away we were told things had changed.  I went directly to the hospital where labs showed I probably had something called HELLP syndrome with hemolysis of my red cells, elevated liver enzymes, and low platelets.  I also had an elevated creatinine, a measure of kidney function, which was odd because it doesn’t go with HELLP.

They delivered the babies, Daniel and Sophie, by c-section that day and at first everything seemed fine.  The babies did great but since they were only 33 1/2 weeks they were taken to the NICU.  I went to recovery but gradually they realized I had not stopped bleeding.   That was the last thing I remembered for about two weeks.  I ended up developing DIC with massive bleeding and low blood pressure.  Several times they told my family and friends that the end was near and I credit my survival to one incredibly dedicated and brilliant critical care physician who didn’t leave my side.

The many smart people working on my case including not just the physicians taking care of my but my physician friends who also brought in folks from the university and around the world eventually decided I had something called atypical Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, and incredibly rare and bad condition that causes kidney failure, hemolysis and low platelets.  Through a combination of plasma exchange, high dose steroids, rituximab, and other things I gradually recovered everything but the kidney failure.

I was in the hospital for about 5 weeks with 3 weeks in the ICU.  Needless to say I had a long and protracted recovery.  The babies did great and were actually ready to go home before I was.  For those of you who know my mom, ask her some time what it was like to have me in the ICU on the second floor, the babies in the NICU on the third floor, and then my dad developed congestive heart failure so was on the fourth floor!  I figured the Latts’ were single-handedly responsible for Rose Medical Center making a 4^th quarter profit.

Back to the twins – they have continued to grow and thrive and now are healthy happy 10 month olds.  Despite being preemies – at their 9 month visit Daniel was in the 80^th percentile for height and the 40^th for weight, and Sophie was in the 95^th percentile for height and the 50^th for weight.

In February I had a kidney biopsy, which showed that my kidneys were unlikely to recover.  I was evaluated for a kidney transplant in March and Sarah was identified early as a possible donor.  Unfortunately individual with aHUS are high risk transplants, and while Sarah was a good match, the transplant team wanted to see if they could find a great match and so we spent another 6 months looking, while I continued on three times/week dialysis, 4 ½ hours per day.

So now, nearly a year before my ordeal began, we have decided to proceed with Sarah as my donor, and surgery is scheduled for 10.21.10. I cannot express how grateful I am to Sarah for her generosity and selflessness in being willing to do this.  Because of my higher risk, I will be doing treatments before and after the transplant to increase the likelihood of success.  The aHUS could recur in the transplant kidney immediately or any time after the transplant.  I will probably be checking labs weekly for the rest of my life.  Thank you for reading this and welcome to our blog!