5 Organs, One Second Chance: The Story Behind Against the Odds

In 2007, I crashed on the operating table during a liver transplant. I was gone for three and a half minutes before doctors brought me back. That should have been the hardest thing I ever went through. It wasn't. It was the first one.

Fourteen years later, in 2021, a blocked vein from that same transplant caught up with me. What followed was one of the rarest surgeries performed in the United States: a multivisceral transplant, replacing my liver, kidney, pancreas, upper and lower intestine, and stomach, all in a single operation. Surgeries like this happen roughly 50 times a year in the entire country. I was one of them.

What that surgery actually involves

Most people, understandably, don't know what a multivisceral transplant is until they or someone they love needs one. It means replacing multiple organs in the abdominal cavity at once, because they're interconnected in ways that make replacing just one impossible or too risky. My own surgeon, Dr. Richard Mangus, has described the work involved as "the ultimate team sport." Having lived through it, I understand exactly what he means. No single person saves you in a surgery like that. A whole team does, in perfect coordination, for hours.

Why this wasn't my first time facing this

I think about the two surgeries side by side often. In 2007, I was 34, and a supposedly sterile tattoo needle had carried Hepatitis C into my bloodstream, which developed into liver cancer. That transplant, and the crash that followed it, was supposed to be the one hard chapter. Instead it was preparation. When 2021 came, I already knew what it meant to wake up grateful simply to be conscious. I already knew what it meant to depend completely on other people. The second surgery didn't teach me those lessons from scratch. It deepened ones I'd already started learning.

What recovery looked like

Recovery from a surgery like this isn't a straight line, and it isn't quick. It's relearning to eat, relearning to walk, and relearning patience with a body that's been rebuilt rather than healed. It's also, for me, deeply spiritual. I don't think I survived either surgery by coincidence. My faith didn't start in that hospital bed, but it was tested and confirmed there in a way nothing else could have done.

From survival to advocacy

I didn't want this story to stay private. Today, I'm the face of Illinois' "Life Goes On" organ donor campaign, a partnership with the Secretary of State's office that has helped register millions of people statewide as organ donors. Every time I tell this story publicly, I'm not just talking about myself. I'm asking someone in that room to consider registering, because the reason I'm alive to tell it is that someone else already had.

If you're reading this and you haven't registered as an organ donor, I'd ask you to consider it today. You don't know whose second chance you might become.