"A child's liver saved my life". twenty-four years after receiving an organ transplant, Trine Engebretsen met the family who made a selfless decision in the midst of awesome grief.(THE COSMO POST)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

By the time I turned 2. I had almost bled to death five times. It was gastric bleeding, accompanied by a severely distended abdomen and terrible jaundice--even the whites of my eyes were a deep yellow. Doctors were baffled at first, but after we visited 12 different hospitals throughout the United States and abroad, my parents finally received the grim diagnosis: alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, a genetic disorder that causes the liver to harden. Without a transplant, the disease would kill me.

This was the early 1980s, when liver transplants were largely experimental; no one from my home state of Florida had ever had one. My parents were told that there were already 50 sick children under 5 years old in the U.S. waiting for a liver transplant. And even if I were somehow lucky enough to be offered one of the precious organs, I'd have only a 30 percent chance of living ... for six months.

The Call

On January 19, 1984, when I was 2 and a half and gravely ill, a little girl named Amanda DeLapp from Mayfield, Kentucky, died of a brain tumor. She was only 18 months old. Her family donated her organs, and since doctors believed I had less than 24 hours to live, I was moved to the top of the organ-recipient list.

The transplant was to take place at the children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, and so within a couple of hours of receiving the phone call, my family and I boarded a private Lear jet in Miami. After 18 hours of surgery, I became one of the youngest people ever to receive a liver transplant, and my new liver began working immediately. (My mom said my original one looked like a rotten potato.) I had to take medication daily growing up, but I was allowed to be active--I did lots of swimming and gymnastics.

When I was about 24, I finally tried contacting the DeLapps, but I never heard back. I figured they didn't want to have any contact. Then one night about a year ago, I got a MySpace friend request from a 23-year-old girl named Keisha DeLapp from Mayfield, Kentucky. My eyes welled with tears, and I practically fell off my chair. There was a picture of Keisha, and the message read "I am Keisha DeLapp. I am Amanda DeLapp's sister." I hadn't even known Amanda had a sister--she was born after Amanda died.