Roberta J. Zito will celebrate this Mother's Day watching her son, Barry Zito, pitch against the New York Yankees. Barry, 24, is a major league pitcher for the Oakland Athletics and winner of the 2002 American League Cy Young Award. But for him, the real story this Mother's Day isn't about baseball awards or even wins and losses. It's about his mom, whose attendance at the game is a miracle in itself.
"I'll never forget the six-hour drive I made on July 11, 1999, from my Class A ball club in Northern California to visit my mother who was about to undergo a liver transplant," he says. "It seemed like the longest drive of my life. All I could think about was my family, my mother's condition and what life might be like without her. Thankfully, someone's generosity saved my mother's life. When you've come as close to losing a loved one as I have, it makes you put the important things in life into perspective."
Four years ago, Roberta J.'s Mother's Day prognosis was indeed grim. The then-55-year-old ordained minister and mother of three needed a liver transplant or she would die.
Although she had been diagnosed in 1997 with an autoimmune disease known as primary biliary cirrhosis, she had been reluctant to seek traditional medical treatments, preferring instead to pursue homeopathic remedies. Changes in her diet didn't help, and she grew weaker and sicker. Realizing that the natural remedies were not helping, she went in 1999 to a hospital near her home in San Diego. Doctors there began testing and working her up for a liver transplant, but she wasn't officially placed on the transplant waiting list.
In May, while visiting her daughter Sally, who lived in Los Angeles, she experienced an episode of extreme breathlessness, and was rushed to the nearest emergency room. "Thank goodness it was Cedars-Sinai," she says.
Doctors there were astounded at how very ill she was. "They admitted me to the hospital right from the emergency room," she remembers. She was immediately put on the liver transplant waiting list, but the odds were not in her favor. Indeed, more than half of those on the transplant list don't live long enough to get one -- there just are not enough available. Thanks to relatively recent advances in living donor liver transplants, patients today have more options, but back in 1999, a living donor transplant was not a possibility for Roberta J.
"She was gravely ill," says John Vierling, M.D., an internationally renowned hepatologist and Medical Director of Cedars-Sinai's Multi-Organ Transplant Program. "Her organs were basically shutting down, one by one."
It was while she was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai that Barry, then a junior at USC, was drafted by the Oakland A's. "I actually heard the draft over a phone and Internet connection while I was in my hospital room," she remembers. "It was so exciting! He was the 9th pick overall," she adds proudly.
But as thrilled as Roberta J. was for her son, her own condition was steadily worsening. In mid-June she experienced encephalopathy, a condition in which toxins go to the brain, causing delirium and incoherence. She lost consciousness and woke several days later on a respirator. "When I woke up, I thought I'd already had the transplant," she remembers. Her family was very concerned, and Barry continued to commute from Northern California with the team to Cedars-Sinai to spend as much time as possible with his mother.
By early July her condition was so bad that her children realized she probably had only days to live. Her blood pressure plummeted on several occasions, and her body temperature dropped to an icy 92 degrees. It didn't seem possible, but as sick as she was, she got even worse. On July 6, she contracted an infection and had to removed from the transplant list.
Her children despaired. During their weeks in the hospital, they had come to know the patients in the rooms on either side of their mother's. They had watched as those patients' livers had failed, and they had eventually died. They couldn't help but notice that Roberta J. seemed to be tracking along the same course.
Three days later, however, doctors tested again, and found no sign of the infection. She went back on the transplant list. The following day, the family got the news for which they had been waiting. A matching donor liver was available. The question now was whether she was strong enough to undergo the transplant. Her organs had been failing one by one, and she was very weak.
"It wasn't just a matter of whether I would survive," she points out. "When you're dealing with something that's made of gold, like a liver, you have to consider everything," she says. "If they gave that liver to me and I had died, it would have been wasted."
After carefully considering all of the factors, Roberta J.'s surgical team, headed by Steven Colquhoun, M.D., Cedars-Sinai's Program Director for Liver Transplantation, elected to move forward with the 6-1/2- hour transplant operation, which ultimately proved successful despite her poor condition. Because she had become so weakened, her recovery was very slow, and she had to re-learn basic skills like turning over in bed, sitting up and walking.
But once she had regained her strength, the first thing she did was write a letter to her donor's family, thanking them for the most precious of all gifts -- life itself. (Although the identities and privacy of donors are carefully protected, she was able to contact her donor family by sending a letter to the hospital and having it forwarded.) On the first anniversary of her donor's passing, Roberta J. sent white roses to the family, thanking them again for their generosity. She also began using the letter "J" in her name, something she had not done before, even though her middle name is Jean. The reason? Her donor's first name began with "J" and by making that initial a highly visible part of her own name, she continuously acknowledges and commemorates her donor.
Today, both Roberta J. and Barry are powerful voices for organ donation. Barry serves as the national spokesperson for Saturn's Organ Donor Day, and Roberta J. uses every opportunity to share her story and to encourage others to become organ donors.
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