Wise Woman Collection-Courage of the Soul: Inspiring Stories of Overcoming Life's Everyday Challenges by Marion Elizabeth Witte & Melissa Murphy

Author:Marion Elizabeth Witte & Melissa Murphy [Witte, Marion Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wise Owl Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2013-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

HEALTH AND HEALING

Life is not about waiting

for the storm to pass...

It’s about learning how to dance

in the rain.

Vivian Greene

The Fourth Time Is A Charm

Richard Darling, D.D.S.

I remain astonished that my body has had four different livers.

I came out of my first liver transplant operation at Loma Linda University Medical Center (LLUMC) on October 29, 1998. The surgery lasted twelve hours. “I want to go home,” is what I meant to write on a pad of paper the nurse was holding. The word “home” is all that was legible. Going home seemed like a simple enough request to me. My wife, Kress, knew that was not going to happen any time soon because I had a least twenty tubes coming out of my body. She played along though and said, “You’ll be going home soon, darling.” Good enough for now, I thought. That short visit with her was all I remembered before I entered into a coma.

I am unsure how I acquired the hepatitis C virus that lead to my liver cancer and the need for my first liver transplant.

Perhaps I contracted it while I was in dental school in San Francisco. I was renting a small apartment during that time, when I remembered my CPA father’s advice about building up home equity. I purchased a small “fixer-upper” in the Sunset District. I would go to dental school during the day and then travel to my new home in the evening to engage in the needed remodeling. Late one night, after several hours of manual labor at my new house, I got into my car to head back to my apartment. As I entered an intersection, a driver failed to beat his yellow light. He smashed into my driver-side door. I was ripped out of my seat belt and my car was propelled into a telephone pole. I was unconscious and going into shock. When I awoke, I was shivering and gratified that a stranger was putting a blanket over me.

In the emergency room I heard the doctors speaking to each other about my severe bruising, low blood pressure, possible arterial hemorrhaging in my legs, and my loss of color. Fearing my life was in jeopardy, they threaded a tube through a vein in my arm to my heart. This enabled the doctors to quickly give me a blood transfusion. That procedure may be how I contracted the hepatitis C virus.

Another possibility may have been through the contaminated vaccines injected into us Vietnam-era veterans while we were in basic training. In fact, I remember the men in front of me who were bleeding from the injection site in their arms, and the recently used bloody gun being wiped clean with only a gauze pad dipped in alcohol before it was injected into the next soldier. Yes, that may also be how the hepatitis C virus entered my body.

By late 1997, I was becoming increasingly ill. I had no stamina and my legs were starting to swell from fluid buildup. Treating patients at my dental office was tiring and difficult.

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