At the beginning of 2023, LaVise was planning her own funeral. The summer before, after nearly eight years of dialysis following the kidney failure diagnosis she received at age 35, she’d begun to decline rapidly. She’d lost the ability to walk, and went into rehabilitation to relearn how, only to be rushed back to the hospital the day after completing the program with COVID. Physicians suspected she had internal bleeding. “I had to have emergency surgery. I went into the ICU for three days. I returned home, and they tried to restart me on dialysis, but with multiple surgeries my body just continued to weaken,” she says. It became clear that without a kidney transplant, LaVise was going to die. “I don’t even know how to explain it,” she says. “I was knocking at death’s door.” She didn’t want anyone to bear the burden of organizing her burial, so she took the arrangements on herself. Even in what she thought to be her final months, her life was dedicated to those around her. It was then that she met Dr. Michael Goldstein, director of the division of organ transplantation at Hackensack University Medical Center. He asked her what she wanted to do, and her answer was simple: “I want to live.” Dr. Goldstein told her, “I believe this is going to happen.” And it did. LaVise was placed on an urgent medically necessary transplant list on Monday. On Friday of that week, she felt weaker than ever. She fell asleep, and woke to the phone ringing. It was Toni, LaVise’s transplant nurse coordinator, with one question: “Are you ready for your kidney?” “I felt a spark of life go through my body,” LaVise says. “It was like winning the lottery 50 times. I knew I was going to live.” “My donor is the major factor who got me here, but I could not thrive without the organ transplant division. I have a special relationship with all of them. I actually held a fundraiser for the hospital a year after my transplant, and they all came. They are a family to me,” she says. LaVise has paid that miracle forward. “I went from death to fully living,” she says, as a volunteer with the NJ Sharing Network, a dialysis mentor and a community manager for Transplantlyfe Forum. “Someone gave me this gift, and the only way I can repay it is to advocate for others and to live,” she says. LaVise joined the Donate Life Month flag raising earlier this month, telling the team that they were the bridge between surviving and truly living. Dr. Goldstein said the same on a panel they were on together: “LaVise is doing everything her donor would want to do.” During all of this suffering, LaVise also had to cope with the death of her husband. She channeled her mourning into going back to school, getting a second bachelor’s degree in psychology. This month, she gave a keynote address on mental health and advocacy. “Anything I can do to pay it forward, to help another person not lose hope,” she says. 𝘗𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘑𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘢𝘯 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘮𝘢𝘯. (fb)