Five months ago, Deborah Graves lay dying in a Vancouver hospital.
Her liver was shutting down, she had lost a dramatic amount of weight because she was too nauseous to eat and her body felt like it was on fire and numb at the same time.
In moments of lucidity, she was aware of the sadness in the eyes of loved ones surrounding her, but she was often unaware of her dire situation due to heavy doses of pain medication.
Thanks to a team of dedicated medical professionals – and someone’s decision to sign up as an organ donor – Deborah, 51, is alive and feeling better than she has in years.
She and husband Mike want to thank everyone, from the medical professionals to people around the world who prayed for her as she underwent two liver transplants last summer.
“I am so thankful about how many people were so intimately involved,” said Deborah, who is still running into strangers who come up and tell her they prayed for her throughout her ordeal last summer.
“She basically could have died two or three times throughout this process,” said husband Mike. “There were times she was barely hanging on and [the medical staff] just didn’t stop. We can’t thank them enough.”
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Deborah was in good health until a couple years after her family moved to Nanaimo from South Africa in 1997 to start Oceanside Church International on Jingle Pot Road.
Doctors attributed her health issues to stress and other conditions and it wasn’t until 2005, when she got extremely ill after a trip back to South Africa, that they discovered her liver was failing. The cause of her liver disease was pegged as a water-borne parasite found in Africa.
For more than five years, Deborah was in and out of hospital and often lethargic. For the past two years, she lived mainly on nutritional shakes due to digestion problems.
“Her eyes were yellow,” said Mike. “There were days she couldn’t get out of bed.”
Last April, Deborah’s liver had deteriorated to the point that doctors put her on the critical list for a transplant.
She got the call in July and had the operation at Vancouver General Hospital hours later.
Things were fine for several days, but then Deborah’s body rejected the organ. She had a second transplant several weeks later, but needed a third surgery to repair a leak that was causing internal bleeding.
“The doctors said to me in between the two operations that her liver is shutting down and they didn’t have another liver and if they did, they didn’t know if it would work,” he said. “But they never gave up. I was hoping they wouldn’t and praying they wouldn’t. It was just a thing of trusting God.”
The hospital staff allowed the family to bring one important milestone to her.
At the beginning of September, her daughter Michal was supposed to get married in Nanaimo, with a pre-booked honeymoon following right after. Since Deborah was still in hospital, staff allowed the young couple to get married on a terrace at VGH so that mom could participate in the big day.
Family and friends – as well as the media – showed up for the unusual wedding.
Two weeks before the ceremony, Michal was preparing herself for her mother’s imminent death – she watched a normally bubbly woman who did her best to hide her illness from others start to literally waste away before her eyes.
“When my mom came out of hospital, that’s when I had a bit of a meltdown,” said Michal. “It’s still kind of surreal that she’s actually OK.”
Deborah was released from hospital about a week and a half after the wedding – sooner than expected – and she’s been on the mend ever since.
While she will be on immune system suppressants for the rest of her life to prevent organ rejection, Deborah says it is a small price to pay for her return to health – she has a healthy glow to her cheeks again and she’s enjoying all kinds of foods that she couldn’t eat in the last few years of her illness, such as hamburgers.
Organ donation saves lives
Deborah Graves is alive and well today because someone made the decision to become an organ donor.
Her husband Mike said the couple wants to get more actively involved in promoting organ donation registry.
While it may feel weird to some people to plan for what happens after death, Mike said one person’s decision to become an organ donor can save the lives of multiple people.
Deborah said people can wait for months for a transplant and her family feared that in her case that the availability of a liver would come too late.
“If we didn’t have the transplant, I wouldn’t be here,” she said.
B.C. Transplant’s website states there are more than 300 British Columbians currently awaiting organ transplants and that the need far outweighs the number of organs available for transplant.
For more information or to register online, please go to www.transplant.bc.ca.
