Besieged by Bills, Transplant Patient Dies

Lolita Cunningham was tired of struggling to pay medical bills and too embarrassed to ask for the help and drugs that could have kept her transplanted heart beating.

She made too much money to be eligible for public aid, but not enough to pay for all the anti-rejection drugs that had kept her alive for 11 years.

Various assistance programs could have helped, but the shy 24-year-old woman, who didn’t “want to bother nobody” even as she was dying, didn’t have the energy to fight through the red tape.

Finally, she just gave up, and her heart gave out.

“She told me she was tired of fighting for medicine, tired of the bills--she just got tired,” said her foster mother, Brenda Datts.

First, Cunningham started skipping days to make her supply of pills, which Datts said cost $600 a month, last longer. But when her last bottle was empty, she didn’t try to get more.

She called Datts Dec. 10 from her $300-a-week temporary job at a SmithKline Beecham laboratory.

“She said, ‘I’m dying. I don’t have any feeling in my legs.’ I said, ‘Get somebody to get you to a hospital.’ She said, ‘I don’t want to bother nobody,’ ” Datts said.

Cunningham died the next day at Temple University Health Sciences Center. Doctors said it was because she had stopped taking the drugs.

Howard Nathan of the Delaware Valley Transplant Program, which arranged Cunningham’s transplant, said the case highlights a problem that gets worse the longer a patient survives--dealing with the huge medical bills after assistance runs out.

In 1985, Cunningham, then 13, became Philadelphia’s first childhood heart-transplant recipient.

A year later, she was back in the hospital for surgery at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children because she stopped taking her medication, which can cause headaches and other side effects.

“Of course I’m glad to get a second chance, but sometimes I get depressed and feel different,” she told the Daily News of Philadelphia two years ago. “It’s hard to explain. People treat you different.”

Most of Cunningham’s care after the transplant was paid for by Medicaid. But she was no longer eligible for the program when she turned 21.

She dropped out of Drexel University to pay her medical bills and worked as a toxicologist at SmithKline Beecham. As a temporary worker, she wasn’t eligible for health insurance.

The company helped pay for her funeral.

For the last three years, Cunningham was enrolled in a program that underwrote the cost of the anti-rejection drug cyclosporin, said Harry Rome, a spokesman for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.

But that program did not cover other expenses--drugs and regular blood tests and biopsies that heart-transplant patients need.

Still, Cunningham had options to pay those bills, but she didn’t follow up.

“We tried to get insurance, but it was too much,” Datts said.

But although she was dying, Cunningham may have been reluctant to ask for help, said Dr. Anna O’Riordan, a cardiologist at St. Christopher’s.

“She always had been a shy girl. She didn’t want to bother anybody,” she said.