Rebecca Davidson: 15 years old, but already a lifetime of pain

In February of 1999, 13-year-old Sara Rosen celebrated her bat mitzvah.

A month later, the Ridgewood, N.J. resident was hospitalized for kidney failure.

I went with my family to visit her on the first of her innumerable hospital stays. She lay in bed, weary from her ordeal, hooked up to all kinds of machines. This was not the vibrant, laughing Sara with whom we enjoyed Friday night meals.

For the next two-and-a-half years, Sara was in and out of hospitals, receiving routine dialysis, chemotherapy and exorbitantly high doses of experimental steroids, not to mention longer hospital stays whenever a complication arose, such as fluid surrounding her heart.

These treatments, while producing deleterious side effects, kept Sara alive. But nothing helped her kidneys, which were, for all intents and purposes, dead.ÿShe was going to need a transplant.

But the wait list for organs was long, and before a transplant could even be considered, Sara first had to be weaned off a certain drug which had to be absent from her system in order for a transplant to be effective.ÿShe grew even more ill, though, every time the doctors lowered her dosage, and she had to remain on the drug.

One of the kidney's main jobs is to cleanse the body of toxins.ÿ When it ceases to function, dialysis can perform the task.ÿSara underwent two kinds of dialysis -- in the first, hemodialysis, a machine drew all the blood from her body, cleansed it of toxins and excess fluids and sent the blood back into her body.

Feel tired after donating a pint of blood to the Red Cross?

Imagine going through the exhausting four-hour process of having all your blood pumped out and then back into your body, twice a week, every week.ÿSara had to do this just to stay alive.

"I could barely walk," she admits.ÿ"I lost so much weight every time I went in for hemodialysis, and it made me nauseous and tired and sick."

Later Sara was switched to peritoneal dialysis, which performs the same function as hemodialysis, but on a continuous basis. Still, four times a day, the bag of fluid attached to a surgically-inserted catheter needed to be drained and replaced, a 45-minute process.

At this point, Sara was in ninth grade, and had not been in school full-time for nearly two years. She opted to perform the peritoneal dialysis in school so she could attend classes with her peers after her long sequence of on-again off-again attendance.

Thanks to the treatment, Sara was able to resume a semi-normal existence. Her health was relatively stabilized -- and by stabilized, I mean she was no longer on death's doorstep -- but she was not well by any means.ÿHer parents began the arduous process of testing to see whether they would be fit organ donors.

Miraculously, both were. Sara was incredibly lucky. As soon as she was healthy enough to undergo the operation, she would receive a functioning kidney from one of her parents.

Most people wait for a term of five to 10 years for a life-saving organ transplant, undergoing dialysis up to four times a day in the interim.

The need for organ donors is so great that people on waiting lists are given special beepers.ÿ If a cadaver with an organ donor card is received at a hospital, a message is sent, via the beeper, to the next person on the donor list and scheduled for an immediate transplant.

But if a cadaver arrives without a donor card, its organs will likely not be harvested. The reasons are various -- either the family does not know what the deceased would have wanted, or the doctors, not wanting to further upset a grieving family, neglect to broach the sensitive subject of organ donation with the bereaved.

Oftentimes, people choose not to fill out a donor card because they think their religion disapproves of posthumous dissection. But according to the National Kidney Foundation, almost all major religions have one of two "official" takes on the matter of organ donation.ÿOnly Shintos and ethnic Gypsies prohibit organ donation -- because of the impurity and the power believed to be associated with a dead body.

Luckily for Sara, she was not at the mercy of the kindness of strangers. In July, she received a kidney from her father.

Sara still has a long road ahead of her. Her ankles are in a great deal of pain and she continues to have medical problems. But hopefully, the worst is over, thanks to a loving father and his compatible blood type.

This June, Sara's little sister Lizzie celebrated her bat mitzvah. Few 13-year-olds could deliver a speech as powerful as hers. Over 50,000 Americans are currently on kidney wait lists, Lizzie said, and in honor of Sara, everyone present should perform the life-saving mitzvah -- the good deed -- of filling out a donor card.

You should too. Doing so could save a life.

Rebecca Davidson is a senior English major from Glen Rock, NJ.

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