c. 2000 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ It was an act of compassion born of coincidences so improbable the participants think they have been touched by a miracle: A conversation between two strangers on an airplane resulted in a gift that saved the life of a desperately ill Louisiana woman.

The patient was Deborah White of Butte LaRose, whose body was rejecting the liver she had received in 1997. Worse yet, the drugs that were supposed to keep that from happening were destroying her kidneys.

The events that changed her life started unfolding Oct. 14, when Janet Larson, White’s sister, stepped aboard an airplane in Jacksonville, Fla. She was heading to Louisiana because she wanted to donate a kidney to White.

The first leg of her journey to Lafayette would take Larson to Memphis, Tenn. Moments before takeoff, one last passenger boarded the crowded jet and took the only empty seat, which was next to Larson. His name was Alan Van Meter, and he was traveling to Illinois to comfort his sister because her 25-year-old son had just died.

Because Larson, 48, was facing medical tests to determine whether she could be a donor for her sister, she was using the flight to read through a pile of literature on kidneys. Van Meter struck up a conversation with her, and learned not only about her plan but also about White’s more urgent need for a new liver.

It suddenly occurred to Van Meter, 42, that his nephew’s liver just might do.

“I felt the presence of God come over me in a very special way,” he said last week. “I told her, `Your sister’s liver, I know where it’s at.’ She thought I was a nut at first.”

They didn’t know whether his nephew’s blood type would match her sister’s. So they used the phone in the back of the next row of seats to reach Memorial Medical Center’s transplant center in New Orleans, where White’s sister had received one liver and was scheduled to receive another when one became available.

White asked whether the gift Van Meter was suggesting, called a directed donation, could be made.

Yes, she was told.

Then Van Meter, a Pentecostal convinced he was carrying out God’s will, took the phone. First he called his sister to find out where his nephew, Michael Gibson, had been taken after shooting himself in the head earlier in the day with his own pistol near his home in Lead Hill, Ark.

The hospital was in Springfield, Mo. By the time Van Meter was switched to the correct department, doctors were minutes away from removing organs from Gibson’s body so they would be available to the general transplant network.

It turned out his nephew and White, 41, had the same blood type, O-positive. After giving Memorial’s number to a nurse in Missouri so the logistics of transferring the organ could be worked out, Larson called her sister to tell her there would be a change in plans.

“I said, `Debbie, don’t get too excited, but I think I might have found a liver for you,”’ Larson said.

But more close calls awaited in the struggle to get the liver to New Orleans and transplanted while it was still viable. Because a scheduled commercial flight refused to wait, an airplane had to be chartered to retrieve the liver and ship it to New Orleans, transplant surgeon Philip Boudreaux said.

Meanwhile, Larson landed in Lafayette, and White got the call she had been awaiting for six months: The organ was a match, and she should report to Memorial’s Mercy campus for surgery. The sisters started the three-hour drive to New Orleans.

By 11:30 p.m., White was being wheeled into surgery. At the end of a long day in which so much depended on timing, Boudreaux and his colleagues made a discovery that made them realize how desperate White’s need was: Her hepatic artery, one of the liver’s two sources of blood, was blocked, and that organ’s usefulness was ebbing away.

“Her liver was on the way out because of that,” Boudreaux said. “It made the transplant more urgent.”

In other words, White said, “My number could have been up.”

The liver transplant operation was successful, and there’s even a bit of lagniappe: White’s kidney function, while abnormal, has remained stable. There is no need for dialysis or a transplant, and, after a bout of pneumonia that had nothing to do with the surgery, she seems to be doing well.

“We are watchful and waiting and hoping for the best,” Boudreaux said, “although we are prepared for the worst. … She is very fortunate.”

White agrees, even though she takes 19 pills a day and is still too weak to work.

“I am one lucky, blessed woman,” she said. “I am a miracle on legs. There has to be a bigger word because even `miracle’ doesn’t fit. I just haven’t found it yet.”

“It was just one miracle after another where God just filled the gaps everywhere,” Van Meter said.

Van Meter has his own reasons for thinking about miracles and liver transplants. He has hepatitis C and eventually will need a new liver. He’s not on the waiting list yet.

“I don’t know if the Lord used me because he wants to bless me with an organ,” Van Meter said. “I think of all kinds of things, but I can’t figure out God. I’m really believing in the Lord to save me. I’m believing that I’m going to be all right.”

DEA END POPE