Rachael Taylor has beaten the odds so many different times throughout her life, but she couldn’t have done it without the invaluable blessing of an organ donation she received. A survivor of hepatic cancer of the liver and a mother of two — her newborn son Tripp born on April 28 — Taylor and her husband Glenn attribute everything they have to the individual who was willing to donate what they could no longer use.
In April, Donate Life Month gives families like the Taylors the chance to spread the word about organ donation and its life-changing importance. After Rachael was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer, cholangio carcinoma, on Aug. 6, 2010, everything changed for the couple and their 18 month-old daughter, Addi Kate.
“The news was not good,” Glenn said. “The doctors at Jewish Hospital said there was a two percent survival rate. We were told she had about a year to live.”
After a failed liver resection, Rachael was then told her liver was failing, and that she had 72 hours to live. Rachael and Glenn reached out to several hospitals across the country, but it wasn’t until the highest-ranked liver transplant surgeon in the country made contact with the couple that the tides began turning.
“He’d just completed his 5,000th liver transplant,” Glenn said. “She was put on the transplant list as 1A, which is critical — the highest you can get on the list.”
With only days left to live, Rachael’s surgeons were able to secure a matched donor liver within 24 hours. The transplant itself was a success, but it resulted in major complications that forced Rachael to undergo numerous surgeries thereafter.
Rachael received full-time care from specialists, nurses and her husband. The recovery process was extremely painful and, even more, the couple had to push through those three months without seeing their daughter, who stayed with Glenn’s parents while Rachael recovered in California.
Rachael was intubated after her Aug. 12 surgery and didn’t wake up until Sept. 16. The experience was “surreal” for both wife and husband.
“I remember looking at one of those white boards they have on the wall, and it said Sept. 16, and I thought, ‘How did it get to be September?’” Rachael said.
Rachael and Glenn returned home and Rachael’s cancer went into remission. All seemed fine until, two years later, Rachael began experiencing severe back pain. The couple went back to Louisville and found out the cancer had relapsed in a small, three centimeter section of her native bile duct.
Rachael was given the same two percent survival expectation.
After a complicated whipple surgery, Rachael’s liver began to fail again. Glenn reached out to their surgeon at UCLA, who told the couple, “Get her back here now.”
In little to no time, Rachael was back on the liver transplant list. The left lobe of her liver had become necrotic due to complications in surgery, but thanks to the previous success of their UCLA-bound liver surgeon, Rachael’s liver failure began to plateau.
“Day by day, her numbers got better. We moved into the same apartment in California as before. We were gone for around four months that time,” Glenn said, noting that his sister and her husband took care of Addi Kate that time. “The support system from her family and my family, from our community, from people who reached out from prayer chains across the country — even though you felt alone at the time, you knew you weren’t.”
Glenn said there were several surreal coincidences that occurred over the course of those years, one of them occurring in the hospital’s waiting room during Rachael’s transplant.
“I talked to this gentleman and we just connected. His wife was getting a heart transplant,” Glenn said. “Later we found out our wives had the same donor.”
Doctors told Rachael and Glenn they’d never be able to have children again. Even after finding a donor and battling the transplant surgery and many other high-risk surgeries, the Taylor family wasn’t finished beating the odds.
“We talked about adoption. Adoption is such an awesome thing,” Glenn said. “But there’s a lot of hoops to jump through when someone has cancer.”
Rachael said the adoption stipulations required that a patient’s cancer be in remission for a certain period of time before they can adopt, and Rachael hadn’t hit that mark. A week before making the drive to Nashville for a yearly checkup, Rachael dreamed she was pregnant.
“I was super angry and I just put it out of my mind,” Rachael said. “On December 4, the day of the appointment, I had another dream. I thought, ‘What is this?’”
The urge to take a pregnancy test being so strong, Rachael pulled over at a gas station outside of Bowling Green, bought a pregnancy test, and took it in the bathroom. It only took 20 seconds for the positive result to show up. Rachael didn’t tell Glenn until she got home.
“I asked [my husband], ‘Would you like to ride a roller coaster with me?” Rachael said. “I pulled the pregnancy test out of my back pocket and handed it to him.”
With the surprises still unfolding for the couple, Rachael found out she was 18 weeks pregnant at her first doctor’s appointment. A team of specialists at Vanderbilt aided the couple through the remaining months of the pregnancy, which required them to adjust her medications to healthy levels for the baby.
A successful delivery and only minor setbacks due to Tripp’s Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) has led the Taylor couple to bringing their second healthy child into the world — something the couple never believed possible.
“Organ donation has such an important role. Not only did organ donation save Rachael’s life, but it brought another person into this world,” Glenn said. “I would never be able to thank those donors enough for the gift they gave us.”
