Daughter Accepted for Heart-Lung Transplant : Mother Searches for Strength to Hope

There are days, when she touches bottom, that Novella Ledford writes herself notes--lines of despair that show the agony of waiting for her daughter to live or die.

For years, it has been like watching her go down a long shallow ramp, emphysema pulling her along. But the last six months have been the hardest--because of hope.

Last fall, 30-year-old Viola Ledford was accepted for a rare heart-lung transplant by Pittsburgh’s Presbyterian University Medical Center. It was a time of heady exultation in this community. The town poured out its dollars, the media reported their dreams. Even the governor donated his plane to fly the Ledfords to Pittsburgh.

But then reality set in. The wait for a donor began.

‘Kept My Suitcase Packed’

“For four months I kept my suitcase packed,” Novella Ledford said. “I didn’t go anywhere. I would jump every time the phone rang. I was going crazy.”

Survival, with each breath, each new day, meant new tension. Where before they had accepted her death, they now had to find new energy for optimism.

With joy, they followed the progress of one young woman, one of the hospital’s 20 heart-lung transplants. She has been taking tennis lessons. But donors have declined, in part because of the crackdown on drunk driving. In those six months, the hospital performed just two more.

“You kind of feel like a ghoul,” Viola Ledford said of the wait for news that someone had died in an accident. “You start saying, ‘There’s another holiday coming up. They’re going to be on the road again.’ ”

Meanwhile, her condition declined steadily. She went from walking down the hall to shuffling to the foot of her bed to use a toilet. Her body bloated with steroids. At Easter, she nearly died.

‘Call the President’

“Mom, help me find a donor,” she pleaded. “Call the President.”

“What more could I do?” Novella Ledford remembered thinking. “What more could she expect of me?”

It is Novella Ledford who may have been hurt most through all of this--she who found the strength to work nights as a nurse’s aide, then tend her daughter at home, once even resuscitating her when her breathing stopped.

“I can’t count the times I knew she wouldn’t live through the night,” she said. Nine months ago, when Viola Ledford moved into the hospital, her mother visited nearly every day.

Tall and thin, a divorced mother of three grown girls, Novella Ledford neither looks nor feels strong. She had been dependent, married to a strong man. “I didn’t know if I could handle things on my own,” she said.

But it was she who balanced oxygen bottles in the little plane on their way to Pittsburgh for evaluation. It was she, who had never asked anyone for anything, who began to raise $100,000 to pay for the operation, who made all the public appearances, talked to the media and wrote letters to the newspaper, keeping reporters posted as the days slipped by.

Mother Hits Bottom

But when, after days became weeks and weeks became months and her daughter worsened, Novella Ledford hit bottom.

“I felt like I was with someone who was drowning and they were pulling me down, and if I didn’t get away I’d drown too,” she said. “I wanted to push her away. I couldn’t stand to look at her, she looked so bad. I said, ‘Why does death have to be so ugly? Why couldn’t she die when she was pretty?’ ”

When Novella Ledford talks about it, she does not like to cry--”I want to sound like a real winner”--but her voice cracks often, and sometimes she stops to wipe away tears.

Viola Ledford felt the tension too. She had long ago accepted her death, but at times she considered suicide “just to end it, to give everybody a break.”

“They can’t live a normal life because of me,” she said. “If I die, they can have a funeral, bury me, and have the grieving over and done with, and make plans and a future and lead normal lives. Right now, they can’t do any of that, or won’t allow themselves to do any of that.

Over the months, the number of visitors to see Viola Ledford dropped. Old friendships suffered, too, for lack of attention by a mother devoting every spare minute to her dying daughter.

In drab hospital room No. 112, mother and daughter became best friends.

“How can I say I’m thankful for this?” Novella Ledford said. “I’m thankful she didn’t die three years ago, when she was a stranger. I’ve come to know a lot of reasons she rebelled as a teen-ager. I’ve come to admire her strength and courage.”