BABY, LOOK AT YOU NOW RHONDA
IF RHONDA Natera was able to meet the organ donors who saved her life on two occasions, she imagines she would be “lost for words”.
The 39-year-old Brisbane mum has the unenviable legacy of being the first child to get a liver transplant in Australia at age two in 1984.
By 2012, Ms Natera’s transplanted liver had to be replaced and she also needed a new kidney.
This led to a mammoth 26-hour surgery, which was followed by 11 further operations within a week and a half to deal with “a lot of complications”. She then had to learn how to walk and talk again after being bedridden in hospital for six months.
“It was hell,” she said of her second transplant.
“But I’m good now. I’m healthy, I’m doing everything normal people do – and a lot things I couldn’t do before, (like) signing up to a gym.”
Ms Natera was born in Papua New Guinea with biliary atresia, a condition in infants that scars and blocks the liver’s bile ducts.
Her parents, Edward and Brenda, flew her to Brisbane to see specialists who told them “there was nothing they could do, and that had I had two to three months to live, maybe six”.
“They weren’t doing transplants in Australia,” she said. “I survived past what they said I would and about two years later, my parents got the call saying they were trialling transplants in Brisbane and I would be their guinea pig.”
The first transplant required a 12hour surgery and left Ms Natera immunocompromised but gave her a relatively normal childhood. Having recovered from her second, she is now “probably the healthiest I’ve ever been”.
She has spoken to her own children about the importance of taking the 60 seconds required to register as an organ and tissue donor, and urges others to do the same. “They wouldn’t have me if my donors’ families didn’t give me their organs,” she said.