‘They thought they were going to lose me’
“After my transplant, I had scans every six months. Since I had two little nodules of cancer in my original liver, they wanted to make sure it didn’t come back.
“Meanwhile, they discovered that my bile duct and the donor’s bile duct never matched up properly. Bile started leaking into my body, and it’s like poison. They couldn’t find a permanent fix, so I had stents replaced in my bile duct every three months for a year. During a scan they found a problem with my portal vein, so I had to get a permanent stent for that.
“Then last summer, I started getting really bad headaches. And all of a sudden, I would get a fever. They thought it was an infection, so they gave me antibiotics. But it kept happening. I also was having pain in my side. When they did another scan, they found a problem with the portal vein stent. I needed surgery to fix it.
“When I woke up in the ICU, so many family members were there. My husband was there with my daughters, plus my brother, all my sisters and my nieces. I didn’t know what was going on. The ICU doctor came in and said, ‘Everything’s OK for right now, until we have your second surgery.’ And I just looked at him.
“I couldn’t talk because I was intubated. They had my hands strapped down so I wouldn’t pull the tube out. I began pounding my hands for them to unstrap me. When they unstrapped one of my hands, I motioned for them to give me something to write with. The first thing I wrote was, ‘What surgery?’ with a big question mark.
“It turned out the stent that was put in earlier had punctured my portal vein, gone into the bile duct, and messed up several other veins. So when they opened me up and saw that mess, they stitched me back up quickly and said I needed another transplant immediately. I was a ticking time bomb ready to explode.
“The scariest part was seeing all my family there. They thought they were going to lose me.”
— RoxAnn Cruz-Martinez
RoxAnn comes from a family of eight. Her parents and oldest brother have passed away.
Related:
