Lisa Salberg
11-24-2005, 02:44 PM
The Arizona Republic (Phoenix)
November 23, 2005 Wednesday Final chaser Edition
SECTION: VALLEY & STATE; Pg. 12B
LENGTH: 593 words
HEADLINE: MOTHER IS THANKFUL FOR GIRL WHO GAVE HER DAUGHTER LIFE
BYLINE: Laurie Roberts, The Arizona Republic
BODY:
Sometime tomorrow, Ineaia O'Donnell will go off to a quiet place where she
can be alone. She'll cry a little as she relives that Thanksgiving Day a dozen
years ago. Then she'll send up a prayer for a family she has never met.
"I know that when I'm sitting down with my family to a big Thanksgiving
dinner, they're probably visiting a gravesite and placing flowers on it," she
says. "They have no idea how thankful I am. I want to meet them one day and just
tell them."
Tell them how her daughter, Marcela, was dying almost from the moment she was
born 16 years ago. How she watched helplessly as her child broke into a sweat
while fighting to breathe. How she would lie on the couch at night with her tiny
daughter on her chest and dread falling asleep, for fear of what she might find
when she woke up.
Doctors told Ineaia that Marcela had asthma, but she knew there was more.
Finally, on Aug. 11, 1993, after yet another frantic trip to the emergency room,
doctors listened. And delivered a death sentence.
Marcela, at the ripe old age of 4, had heart disease: hypertrophic
cardiomyopathy. She would need a new heart or she would die within six months.
Then came the second blow. Ineaia's insurance wouldn't cover a transplant.
She would need to come up with $180,000 before her daughter could be put on the
list.
"I'm literally dying inside," Ineaia says. "I'm grieving, dying, crying by
her bedside, and I'm supposed to do fund-raising?"
Instead, the 29-year-old single mother of three, a sales clerk at JCPenney,
took her story to the media, asking why organ transplants were reserved only for
the rich.
It worked. On Oct. 8, 1993, the state's health care plan for the poor agreed
to pay for the transplant.
And so they waited. Marcela, with her failing heart, and Ineaia, with the
awful knowledge that for her child to live, someone else's would have to die.
At 2 a.m. on Nov. 25, 1993, the phone rang. The heart of a 4-year-old girl
was on its way from Evansville, Ind., to University of Arizona Medical Center.
They flew down Interstate 10 to Tucson that morning, Marcela in the front
seat singing country-Western songs with her grandfather and Ineaia in the back,
quaking at the prospect of handing her daughter over, to live or maybe to die.
Marcela became Arizona's second youngest heart recipient that Thanksgiving
day.
Every day since, they've lived with the knowledge that her body could reject
her new heart. Every day, Marcela copes with medications and side effects and
dire predictions by doctors who deal only in the physics of the heart and not
the depth of it.
At 16, Marcela sparkles as she talks about life and its possibilities. Some
day, she'd like to dance with a hip-hop band. Some day, she'd like to have kids,
six of them.
Oh, there are hard days. Marcela dropped out of school this fall. Her kidneys
are failing, and it was just too hard to keep up as doctors changed her
medications. She'll go back, she says, but for now, she's working at Peter Piper
Pizza, working on just enjoying every day.
Life, she would tell you, really is a gift.
"I got my second chance," she says. "You wake up every day and you can't
complain because you have a second chance."
Somewhere there's a family that gave Marcela that chance. If she could,
Ineaia would tell them that she hasn't forgotten. If she could, she'd tell them
that it's a loving heart, a strong heart. If she could, she'd tell them.
Grateful doesn't even begin to cover it.
November 23, 2005 Wednesday Final chaser Edition
SECTION: VALLEY & STATE; Pg. 12B
LENGTH: 593 words
HEADLINE: MOTHER IS THANKFUL FOR GIRL WHO GAVE HER DAUGHTER LIFE
BYLINE: Laurie Roberts, The Arizona Republic
BODY:
Sometime tomorrow, Ineaia O'Donnell will go off to a quiet place where she
can be alone. She'll cry a little as she relives that Thanksgiving Day a dozen
years ago. Then she'll send up a prayer for a family she has never met.
"I know that when I'm sitting down with my family to a big Thanksgiving
dinner, they're probably visiting a gravesite and placing flowers on it," she
says. "They have no idea how thankful I am. I want to meet them one day and just
tell them."
Tell them how her daughter, Marcela, was dying almost from the moment she was
born 16 years ago. How she watched helplessly as her child broke into a sweat
while fighting to breathe. How she would lie on the couch at night with her tiny
daughter on her chest and dread falling asleep, for fear of what she might find
when she woke up.
Doctors told Ineaia that Marcela had asthma, but she knew there was more.
Finally, on Aug. 11, 1993, after yet another frantic trip to the emergency room,
doctors listened. And delivered a death sentence.
Marcela, at the ripe old age of 4, had heart disease: hypertrophic
cardiomyopathy. She would need a new heart or she would die within six months.
Then came the second blow. Ineaia's insurance wouldn't cover a transplant.
She would need to come up with $180,000 before her daughter could be put on the
list.
"I'm literally dying inside," Ineaia says. "I'm grieving, dying, crying by
her bedside, and I'm supposed to do fund-raising?"
Instead, the 29-year-old single mother of three, a sales clerk at JCPenney,
took her story to the media, asking why organ transplants were reserved only for
the rich.
It worked. On Oct. 8, 1993, the state's health care plan for the poor agreed
to pay for the transplant.
And so they waited. Marcela, with her failing heart, and Ineaia, with the
awful knowledge that for her child to live, someone else's would have to die.
At 2 a.m. on Nov. 25, 1993, the phone rang. The heart of a 4-year-old girl
was on its way from Evansville, Ind., to University of Arizona Medical Center.
They flew down Interstate 10 to Tucson that morning, Marcela in the front
seat singing country-Western songs with her grandfather and Ineaia in the back,
quaking at the prospect of handing her daughter over, to live or maybe to die.
Marcela became Arizona's second youngest heart recipient that Thanksgiving
day.
Every day since, they've lived with the knowledge that her body could reject
her new heart. Every day, Marcela copes with medications and side effects and
dire predictions by doctors who deal only in the physics of the heart and not
the depth of it.
At 16, Marcela sparkles as she talks about life and its possibilities. Some
day, she'd like to dance with a hip-hop band. Some day, she'd like to have kids,
six of them.
Oh, there are hard days. Marcela dropped out of school this fall. Her kidneys
are failing, and it was just too hard to keep up as doctors changed her
medications. She'll go back, she says, but for now, she's working at Peter Piper
Pizza, working on just enjoying every day.
Life, she would tell you, really is a gift.
"I got my second chance," she says. "You wake up every day and you can't
complain because you have a second chance."
Somewhere there's a family that gave Marcela that chance. If she could,
Ineaia would tell them that she hasn't forgotten. If she could, she'd tell them
that it's a loving heart, a strong heart. If she could, she'd tell them.
Grateful doesn't even begin to cover it.