A Mother’s Angel Gives Life to Many

Most of her life, Michele Garibay felt doomed in love and cursed by bad health.

Her sisters were pretty and petite. She was chunky and tall.

Her sisters had boyfriends and jobs. She was sick, always struggling with another collapse, another out-of-control fever, another round of delirious nights with intravenous drips and catheters and antiseptic hospital smells.

There were times when she didn’t care whether she lived or died.

And then along came an angel, a child who taught her love and strength and laughter, who wrapped her in happiness, who assured her with every hug and every smile and every cry of “Mommy! Mommy!” that she was the most special person in the world.

Michele knew it was a miracle--and she knew it was too precious to last.

And so, when the doctor broke the news, she accepted his words with a strength that seemed unimaginable.

She didn’t cry when her 3-year-old daughter was declared brain-dead.

She didn’t hesitate when asked about donating her daughter’s organs. For years, Michele had been on a waiting list for a kidney transplant; she understood her child could save other lives.

But what the doctor suggested next seemed so unbearable, so unreal, she almost fainted in horror.

Your child’s kidneys could save your life.

“No!” Michele gasped, burying her face in her hands. “I’d rather die and be with her.”

Elise Garibay Badillo came into the world against all the odds--born to a mother who wasn’t supposed to have a baby, who wasn’t even supposed to live.

At 17, Michele had been diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease that would eventually destroy her kidneys. She would need dialysis four times a day. She would get progressively worse. There was no cure.

But the worst blow of all was when doctors warned her against having the baby she had always dreamed of. To get pregnant, they said, would be to risk her own life and that of the child.

Neither Michele nor her doctors counted on her falling in love, on a whirlwind romance between two college students working in the Wrigley Gum factory for the summer.

When they broke up on Valentine’s Day in 1998, Michele was six months pregnant. She was 23 and terrified.

There was never any question that she would try to have the baby. The question was whether they would both survive.

Bedridden for much of her pregnancy, Michele read everything she could about motherhood. She played Vivaldi for the baby kicking in her womb. She read aloud stories from Dr. Seuss.

She might not be a mother for long, she told her own mother. But she would be the best mother she could possibly be.

On May 13, Michele gave birth to a healthy, 6-pound, 7-ounce girl. She called the baby Elise, a name she thought graceful and rare.

Elise inherited her mother’s dark hair and mischievous smile. But she possessed something more: a sunny self-confidence, a kind of innate wisdom about her place in the world that made her seem older than her years. The first grandchild, the first niece, she was worshipped by a brood of Mexican relatives--every smile, every antic, every milestone captured in photographs.

By the time she was 2, she could mimic the lines of her favorite movies in English and Spanish. At 3, she was sifting through photos of Michele’s male college friends, searching for a suitable “Daddy” to live with them.

Michele would shake her head and laugh.

“It’s you and me against the world,” she would say. “And that is the way it will always be.”

Mother and daughter were a familiar sight in their South Chicago neighborhood, bouncing down the streets in Michele’s rusty old Mustang--belting out Britney Spears songs, trailing princess dresses, slurping blue Slurpees, acting for all the world like summer-crazed teens.

But everyone could see it couldn’t last. As Elise grew lanky and strong, her mother grew sickly and weak.

Michele couldn’t lift her daughter or pick up her toys. She couldn’t take Elise to the child’s favorite place--the beach--because of the dangers of infecting the incision in her stomach for the dialysis catheter, or the one in her chest for the intravenous drip.

Often they stayed at Elise’s grandparents’ house because Michele was too sick to walk. Michele’s mother would creep into the bedroom and weep at the sight of her daughter and granddaughter curled in each other’s arms.

And she would wonder: what will happen to Elise when Michele is gone?

The little girl never stood a chance. An October storm, a gust of wind, an enormous branch cracking and falling at precisely the moment Elise was skipping beneath it. Though doctors performed emergency surgery, they knew there was little hope.

Friends and family flocked to University of Chicago Children’s Hospital, where Elise lay in a white gown dotted with teddy bears, tubes inserted into her nose and arms and head, a respirator over her mouth. They played Vivaldi and Britney Spears. They prayed aloud in English and Spanish.

Michele refused to cry in her daughter’s presence. Instead, she would lean over the bed and whisper, over and over: Mommy will be here when you wake up.

Emergency room pediatrician Dr. Chris Clardy had rarely seen such strength. And he had rarely been so moved.

Clardy, a kidney specialist as well as a pediatrician, noticed Michele’s limp, her yellowish skin, her gaunt face. He spotted the dialysis catheter dangling beneath her shirt.

Without telling Michele, he called her doctors. He learned that Michele had been waiting for a kidney transplant for years, that cousins and sisters and parents had been tested, but no family member was a match.

But mother and child were.

Moments after declaring Elise brain-dead, Clardy sat down with Michele. There was no time to be gentle. There was no time to console. The clock was ticking and she had to make a decision fast.

You have perhaps a year to live, Clardy told her. Your daughter is your only chance.

A kidney can last 48 to 72 hours once the brain is dead, but the longer the delay, the less likely it is the transplant will succeed. And with a child’s kidneys, the deterioration is even more rapid.

For years Michele had known she might one day face a decision about transplant surgery. Her biggest fear had been what would happen to Elise if she didn’t survive. Now she was being forced to make the cruelest decision of her life.

How could she live with her child’s organs growing inside her?

How could she not?

And another question: How could she go through surgery knowing her daughter was being buried at the same time? What kind of a mother missed her daughter’s funeral?

Michele insisted that Elise’s father, David Badillo, help with her decision. Although they were no longer a couple, Badillo, a law student, had been part of Elise’s life. He had custody every other weekend; the accident happened on one of Elise’s visits. At the hospital, he never left her bedside.

Badillo told Michele he would support whatever decision she made.

Michele’s mother told her the choice was clear.

Elise was an angel, Irene Garibay said. She was an angel sent by God on a mission. And that mission was to save Michele’s life. How else could they explain the child’s death? How else could they accept it?

For the first time since the accident, Michele sobbed uncontrollably. Even at her daughter’s bedside, she couldn’t stop the tears.

“You are not supposed to die and leave me alone,” she said.

Fiercely, she caught herself. She dried her eyes.

“Go,” she whispered. “Don’t stay for me. I will be OK. I will be strong for you. Go, Elise, Go!”

She didn’t want Elise’s spirit to linger. A mother had to set her daughter free.

Moments later, Michele was whisked off in an ambulance for surgery in a hospital across town.

At Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, Dr. Deepak Mital looked at the tiny kidneys on ice, a third the size of an adult’s. He looked at the mother lying on the operating table.

“This has to work,” he thought. “There has to be some meaning to this tragedy.”

Mital performs about 75 kidney transplants a year. But this was the most complicated he had ever faced. It is rare to transplant two kidneys to one person, rarer still to transplant a toddler’s organs into an adult. The biggest danger, aside from rejection, is that the small kidneys will become twisted or displaced inside a body that is too big to contain them--and will die.

For five hours, Mital painstakingly stitched the daughter’s organs into the mother’s, vein to vein, artery to artery. And when it was done, when emotion could once again nudge aside professional precision, Mital thought of his own children. And of the little girl who had given her mother life.

These kidneys have to work, he repeated.

They buried Elise in her princess dress with a tiara on her head and a teddy bear in her arms. Her eulogy was a letter from her mother.

Thank you Elise, Michele wrote. Thank you for the most wonderful 31/2 years. Thank you for teaching me to be strong. Thank you for giving me life.

The letter was buried with the child.

A few hours after Elise’s coffin was lowered into the ground, Michele noticed a tingling in her hands, a pinkness when she pressed her palms. She gazed at them in wonder. They hadn’t been pink in years.

And then she realized. Her blood wasn’t contaminated anymore. Her daughter’s kidneys were already working. Over and over she squeezed her hands.

Thank you, Elise, she said.

The mother dreams about her daughter all the time, but Elise’s spirit has visited just once.

Michele was lying in bed, too sad to move, too tired to stop the tears. And then she felt it, one of those loopy hugs they used to give each other every morning, so tight, so long, they joked they might choke the breath out of each other.

“She came,” Michele says. “She didn’t let me see her, not even in a dream, because she knew it would be too painful. But she let me sense her and smell her and she let me know that she is OK.”

Six months after surgery, Michele is healthier than she has been in years. She can hobble without her cane; the nerve damage to her feet caused by kidney failure is gradually healing.

The kidneys growing inside her--they are now almost full size--are only organs, she says. She doesn’t think of them as a part of her daughter.

She points out that Elise gave life to others too: Her liver went to a 15-year-old, her small intestine to an infant.

“The part of my daughter that is with me is the memory of her 31/2 years,” Michele says. “That is the part that matters.”

Lupus is a mysterious illness and doctors don’t know how it may eventually affect her new kidneys. Michele must take anti-rejection medication daily. She still tires and catches infections easily. She still has days when grief numbs her soul.

But she is living again, a new life, one that is rich in a new way.

She keeps a journal to remember little things, like the sound of Elise’s laugh. Someday she hopes to share it with her next child.

She plans to return to Columbia College in Chicago and finish her degree in communications.

She is singing and playing guitar again with her all-girl Spanish-language rock band for the first time in years.

They have a few gigs set up. And they have a new song.

It’s a song about an angel, a child sent into the world on a mission. Written by Michele, it is a mother’s tribute, and a mother’s lament.

In Spanish, Michele sings it, eyes shining, voice husky and tender and strong.

Algun dia estaremos juntos

mi angel, mi alma.

Someday we’ll be together.

My angel, my soul.