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The Bad News
Through the rest of Kelli’s childhood and teenage years, her life alternated between medical emergencies (including suffering a mild stroke and having a pacemaker implanted) and stretches of semi-normalcy. She attended public school and tried to make friends with kids her own age. Yet even during the good years, Kelli was too sick for much physical exertion. When other kids ran around on the playground, she had to stay on the sidelines. “Kids didn’t really understand what was going on with me,” she says. “They thought I was weird.” So she tended to spend time alone or around adults, whom she could talk to more easily than kids her own age.Kelli also related well to animals. After her family moved to Palm Desert, California, when she was 15, she’d spend time at the nearby Living Desert Zoo and Botanical Gardens to observe and photograph roadrunners, coyotes, Mexican wolves, a bobcat and even a reticulated giraffe. At home, she doted on the family cats, particularly her favorite, a black female named Lulu. Occasionally, Kelli had more unusual pets, like a spindly praying mantis. “It would eat from my hand,” she says. “I had no idea an insect could recognize me. But it did. It was really cool.”
In 2002, things got much worse for Kelli. She developed ascites, or fluid in her abdominal cavity. This meant her liver wasn’t working properly—a consequence of her heart defect and the procedures that had served as temporary fixes. The fluid was causing Kelli pain and had to be surgically drained frequently.
Finally, in October 2003, Kelli’s cardiologist broke the bad news: Her liver was failing. She needed a liver transplant as well as a new heart if she was going to survive. Heart-liver transplants are both difficult and rare—only about 50 people in the United States have had this double transplant. Plus, the few hospitals equipped to do the surgery are extremely selective about whom they take. The patient must be sick enough to need the transplant yet not so sick that she’s unlikely to live through the hazardous procedure. Kelli hovered perilously on the borderline.
When her cardiologist began making inquiries, several hospitals turned him down right away. Only UCLA Medical Center even agreed to evaluate Kelli. For the next seven months, UCLA put Kelli through a complex battery of exams and tests, both physical and psychological—and then turned her down. The deal breaker was Kelli’s high level of antibodies, which meant the likelihood that her body would reject a transplant was also very high. Kelli and her parents were devastated. “We had no reason not to believe that they were going to take her,” says Robert. “It was a really big shock.”
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