NYPD Mom of 2 Needs Transplants

I’m reaching out to everyone I know to please help out a dear friend of mine. I have known Dana for 22 years. We met each other on the first day of high school and we instantly became inseparable. My parents basically raised her; she would be at my house every day after school until 11pm when her grandmother would pick her up after bingo and all day on the weekends. We made sure to go to the same college just so we wouldn’t be apart. We have since grown and started families.

​Dana is a wonderful wife to a Queens’s police officer and a great mother to two beautiful girls. Lilly, my God daughter, is two and a half and Lia is six months old.

Dana was not diagnosed properly by a Massapequa doctor when she experienced distention in her stomach after her first child. She went on to have a second baby.

After the birth of her daughter Lia, her condition and distention got much worse causing the start of kidney failure and malnutrition from her stomach being squashed to the point where she can hardly eat. She was then diagnosed with a rare disease called polycystic kidney and liver disease. It causes those organs to be covered in cysts to a point where they grow so large they compress all the other organs, causing extreme pain, malnutrition and eventually failure.

Dana is currently on the organ donor list to have a liver transplant, after her recovery, her brother who lives out of state is donating a kidney to her. Dana is a hard working real estate agent and only gets paid if she works, needless to say she will need to be in recovery for quite some time. Her family and children will need childcare, they will also have to pay for a tremendous amount of medication and have numerous medical expenses. There is also the expense to fly her brother to New York and make sure he is also taken care of also after his donation surgery.

I truly admire Dana. She has been so consumed with the “what if’s” of this situation but she keeps her head up for her family. In her house its business as usual. Dana gets up and to go to work, cooks, cleans and still tries to keep in shape in preparation for her double transplants. You would never know all she is going through by looking at her. In fact the only people who do know are the people she has confided in. She is not one to ask for help so I am taking it upon myself to make her life easier and her mind more at ease, by her knowing her family will be ok and in good hands for the time she will need to recover.

Please find it in your heart to donate to this family and if you can’t please pass on this message of love along.