What twins can do together
Call them twins. Even though Joanie Coombs is 65 and her sister, Dianna Farmer, is 61, they might as well be twins because they often text and call each other at the same time as well as complete each other’s sentences. They are twins in spirit, sisters in blood and riding buddies in the flesh.
Given their affinity for riding bikes together, Coombs wanted to give her sister a new bike for Christmas.
“A new bike for Christmas” and to celebrate Farmer’s “liverversary.” Two years ago, after stage 4 liver failure and so close to death doctors told her sister to start making funeral arrangements, Farmer received a new liver (livers are so scarce that “you have to be talking to Jesus” to get one) at the UCLA Medical Center. This December was Farmer’s two-year anniversary and if it hadn’t been, it was Christmas anyway.
There is nothing better than a new bike. It brings out the better side of us, the younger side of us and the side of us that yearns for the open road and a chance to find out where it leads and who and what we might find when we arrive.
Farmer, who last worked in security for Centennial
High School, had an old Schwinn but the back brake rubbed. The brake seemed haunted. Nobody could fix it, not even John, Coombs’ husband, who took a crack at it.
The bike was a mess and Farmer was always behind during their 5-mile rides to Shafter from their home in Rosedale. (Four years ago when Farmer first got sick, Coombs and her husband renovated the farmhouse on their 10-acre home and moved Farmer in.)
“She floated along,” Farmer said. “I could never catch up.”
“Never catch up.” That sounds like a younger sibling. Sounds like a younger sister who would like nothing better than to beat her older sister to the stop signs and then outsprint her in between.
In early December, Coombs went to Action Sports. She was helped by Curt Pierce, an avid cyclist himself as well as someone who takes a keen interest in the story of his customers’ lives should they be inclined to share them.
“She chose the Townie 7D from Electra in violet because violet is Dianna’s favorite color and her mother’s name,” Pierce said. “This one got emotional.”
Coombs was planning to wait until Christmas to give her sister the bike but was so eager she brought her into the store a few days later. December was turning out to be dry and Coombs wanted to ride before Christmas.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Farmer said. “I test drove it with boots on. They had adjusted it perfectly for me. It was a sweet ride.”
Coombs had delivered on a promise she’d made before the liver transplant.
“I told my sister when you get through this, we’re going to ride together,” Coombs said. “We’re going to keep hope alive.”
Hope had been under assault. Farmer had cirrhosis of the liver, not alcohol-related but genetic, having killed both her grandfather and his sisters. With the help of Coombs and a good friend, Cheryl Bailey, she made more than three dozen trips to UCLA, finally culminating on Dec. 15, 2018, when Farmer received a liver from an 18-year-old man.
“I am so thankful to him and his family,” Farmer said. “I feel like I’m in my 20s again.”
Four or five times a week, in the middle of the day when it is the warmest, the sisters ride to Shafter on peaceful, empty farm roads. They float along together. They might as well be twins.
No article about organ donation is complete without an appeal.
“One person putting a sticker on their license can save seven people,” Farmer said.
For more information on organ donation, visit the United Network for Organ Sharing’s (UNOS) website at unos.org. UNOS is the private, nonprofit organization that manages the U.S. organ transplant program.