It all started in 1989, that is
when my dad
started not acting like my dad. My dad has always been a
hard working man
making sure our family always had a roof over our head and food on our
table.
He was a teacher and during those summer months and winter breaks he
would take
up odd jobs to help with the expenses of raising 4 kids.
One of the jobs that I think made me who I am today was that he was a park ranger for the State of Oregon when I was really young. Since then I’ve always had a love for the outdoors and my family loves to go camping every chance we get. But, in 1989 the job he took that summer was at a fish packing facility.
Though taking this job helped put my sister through college, it almost killed him. Now you wouldn’t think a little thing like a hook catching your finger would be a big deal. Put a band-aid on it and go back to work. (And that is exactly what he did)
What we didn’t realize was that hook would be the thing that changed our lives. That hook was contaminated with Hepatitis C and started immediately attacking my dad’s liver. Within months my dad was acting funny, saying weird phrases and once even took a bath letting the water overflow while eating a shoe. Yes, eating a shoe! Seems when your liver stops working your ammonia levels in your body get high enough you start to hallucinate.
At this point Hepatitis C was fairly new and doctors weren’t giving our family much hope. They said more than likely he was going to have only a few months to live unless he was able to get a liver transplant. They also said the odds of that were slim because they had to find a match for my father.
So, our family as hard as it was started making funeral plans just in case and started preparing ourselves for a life without dad. But, we prayed daily that they could find a cure or find a donor for my dad. In November 1990 my dad really started to take a turn for the worse and we knew we didn’t have long.
That is when the doctors gave him a pager that if that pager went off he was to go immediately to the hospital. Well, unfortunately during his time at home that pager never went off and in late November he was put in the hospital for what we thought was his final days. The doctors did everything they could to ease his pain and pro-long his life.
Then on December 17, 1990 the pager went off, they had a match, they had found a donor in Texas. They immediately put my dad in the Life Flight helicopter and took him to the Portland airport where they used the Life Flight plane and flew him to Texas to Baylor University.
Baylor at the time was the number one transplant hospital in the United States and I have to say I’m thankful for them every day. On December 19, 1990 my dad got a new liver and a new chance at life. He is one of the longest living liver transplant recipients in the world and the doctors love to see him. You see my dad does exactly what the doctors tell him to do! Most patients go back to a life of eating unhealthy, drinking or other things that can do harm to your body and die within 10 years. My dad has lost many friends that he met during his stay at Baylor.
So, thank you Baylor for making the last 20 Christmas’s with my dad special and our holiday miracle come true.
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