Girl recovering after double-lung transplant surgery
12-year-old ‘Christmas miracle’ from Abbotsford on road to a normal life
Autumn Carlson is one feisty little firecracker, according to her mom, Sabrina.
The 12-year-old Abbotsford girl battled her way through a bonemarrow transplant for childhood leukemia six years ago, and then survived a host of kidney, bowel and liver problems when graft versus host disease set in as a complication.
The illness eventually destroyed her lungs, too, but a recent double-lung transplant at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Kids has finally put Autumn back on the road to a normal life.
“I’ve watched my daughter’s lungs fight, working so hard,” said Sabrina. “Then, last night, her chest was moving normally, like a regular set of lungs. It was overwhelming.”
Her opportunity to live came at the cost of another young life.
“My daughter has a little boy’s lungs and gets an opportunity to live because of his family,” said Sabrina. “My heart hurts for his family as they grieve, and I am grieving with them.”
The exhausted and grateful mother of four shared the waiting room with two other families during Autumn’s surgery, one of whom apparently received a heart for their little girl from the same donor. She turned eight just a few days ago and spent 459 days waiting for the life-saving organ.
Sabrina hopes to thank the boy ’s family personally through Facebook in the days ahead.
“I hope it is a comfort to them that a part of him will live on in my daughter Autumn,” she said. “They are my heroes and we can’t possibly express our gratitude for such a gift.”
Autumn is gaining ground since the Sunday surgery in the critical care unit, although she is frustrated that she can’t speak.
“She has a tube in her mouth, so for now she is spelling things,” said Sabrina. “We talked about communication after the operation, but I didn’t know it would be this hard.”
Although Autumn’s journey to this point was difficult, it wasn’t as long as her mother feared when her lungs started to give out last spring.
“She started to decline and her lung function dropped to 21 per cent. By June, we knew she would need a transplant,” she said. “The testing showed she was a perfect candidate, but they warned us it could be a year or two.”
Then one of Autumn’s lungs collapsed, which meant she couldn’t even travel to Toronto to start her wait for new lungs for at least six weeks. Then it collapsed again. And again.
Finally, with the help of a special valve to keep her lung from collapsing, Sabrina and Autumn made the journey. Her father and three siblings stayed home in Abbotsford to wait for good news.
On Saturday afternoon, they got a call about a potential donor after just 32 days on the waiting list.
“I tried not to get my hopes too high, because they said there could be quite a few dry runs,” said Sabrina.
In a dry run, the match may not be right, or the organ is not viable and the surgery is cancelled.
They waited through the night and at 8 a.m., a nurse came with anti-rejection drugs to pre-medicate Autumn for surgery.
“That’s when I knew, this is it,” she said. The eight-and-a-half hour operation was a success.
“I couldn’t ask for a better gift,” said Sabrina. “She’s my Christmas miracle.”
Maintaining two households, even with the affordable rent at Ronald McDonald House, has been a huge strain on the family and Autumn faces months of physiotherapy before she will be cleared to return home.
“We have a daughter with Down syndrome and she doesn’t under- stand why mommy is away for so long,” said Sabrina.
A GoFundMe page, Autumnsfightforlife, has been set up to help the one-income Carlson family with their expenses and travel.
And because Autumn misses her home in southwestern B.C. so much, she wants as many pictures as possible from home sent to her through her Instagram account @autumnsfightforlife or with the hashtag #autumnsfightforlife and through her Facebook page. (She loves animals.)