Transplant Leads to Life of Dependency
JoAnn Ottmers begins each morning by swallowing the first of 39 pills she needs to get through the day since getting her new liver nine months ago.
Then the 60-year-old widow waits for a visiting nurse to help with the most basic of functions: walking and going to the bathroom.
Anger and depression alternate in her voice as JoAnn talks about the medical ordeal that has completely changed her life.
“I can’t go out by myself anymore. I can’t drive. I can’t walk in a big store . . . ,” JoAnn says, pushing a stray lock of gray hair out of her eyes.
But to the medical community, JoAnn is an incredible success story: Doctors gave her a 2% chance of surviving the 14-hour transplant operation, she says.
For her part, she is not sure that surviving was the best outcome.
“I don’t think you ever saw me before without a smile,” says JoAnn, tears coming to her eyes. “Now it’s strange to see me with one.”
Originally from Queens, JoAnn moved to Kansas City with her five children in 1972. A few years later, she learned she had diabetes. For the next 18 years, she controlled her illness with twice-daily shots of insulin, she says.
Constantly on the go--she worked as an office manager while taking care of her children--she often had high blood sugar because, as she freely admits: “I was a cheater. I liked to eat normal food.”
She also helped keep house and cook for an extended family of Ottmers who were continually coming and going in her modest frame house in a rundown neighborhood in northeast Kansas City.
“I used to drive all the time. I’d drive anybody’s car that was around,” she says, smiling at the memory.
But her doctors were concerned about the persistently high blood sugar. So when a new drug called Rezulin came on the market in March 1997, they were quick to prescribe it. In fact, the doctors were so eager to get her started that they gave her a month’s supply of free samples.
“They told me about this wonderful new drug . . . ,” JoAnn recalls.
She felt fine at first. The Rezulin did lower her blood sugar, although not significantly. But within days of when she took the drug, nausea set in. She also recalls having trouble walking, as if her balance was off.
One night while lying on the couch, JoAnn was startled by a TV news report on Rezulin. “They said that it caused liver damage and talked about the different symptoms people were having, and it was the same symptoms I was having,” she says. “I was scared. . . . I couldn’t believe people could be dying from it, and here I was taking it.”
JoAnn logged on to the family computer and took the steps that she believes helped save her life. She found several Web sites with information on the drug’s harmful effects and immediately stopped taking Rezulin.
But already her skin and eyes were turning yellow with jaundice, her urine was dark and her mind was beginning to wander.
When doctors said the only hope--and it was a thin reed--was a liver transplant, the family readily agreed.
As the ambulance rushed her 250 miles across Missouri to the nearest organ transplant center in St. Louis, a caravan of Ottmers followed: five children, three brothers and a sister.
At first, no liver was available. But when one came up, JoAnn agreed to the operation only reluctantly. “I didn’t want someone else’s body part in mine,” she says firmly. “But the children made me do it. . . .”
The hardest days were yet to come. When she returned home, JoAnn was hardly capable of enjoying even a fragment of the life she once led.
There was no more taking her eight grandchildren to the park or stopping for a game of bingo or gambling on the riverboats.
Often overwhelmed by her illness, she does not want to see anyone. Tears come to her eyes when she describes missing one grandson’s first birthday.
“If I could warn just one person about the Rezulin, it would be worth it,” JoAnn says. “This is the first time I’m not looking forward to the holidays, to Christmas. I’m dreading it.”
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JoAnn Ottmers
Age: 60
Hometown: Kansas City, Mo.
Occupation: Retired
Rezulin use: 3 months
Outcome: Liver transplant
