NORFOLK, Va. — Kurt Beach, a rookie with the Smithfield Police Department, was the only officer working the midnight shift in February 1988 when a residential call came in. A child had stopped breathing.
Beach remembers hearing the mother's cries as he walked to the front door. In one of the bedrooms, a baby girl was lying on a bed, surrounded by medical equipment.
The baby suffered from the birth defect spina bifida and had undergone a tracheotomy, a surgery that makes an opening in the windpipe to better allow air into the lungs. Beach tried CPR.
His eyes close as he tells the story.
"I couldn't get breaths into her, and her heart had stopped," Beach says. "I just did what I thought I had to do."
He moved the child to the kitchen table to stabilize her. Then he covered her mouth and nose, while sucking mucus and blood from the opening in the windpipe. Thinking the airway was clear, Beach spat the fluid on his sleeve and tried another round of CPR.
Members of the volunteer rescue squad showed up and took over.
"I remember them saying she was gone, and it really hit me hard," Beach says. "It bothered me a long time … What could I have done different?"
When Beach says this, he is not speaking of the equipment he could have worn or the shots he could have taken to prevent the other casualty that day.
Beach has had no problem finding folks willing to sacrifice half their liver for him. It's finding the right person that has proved difficult.
With about 16,000 people nationwide waiting for a liver transplant, Beach isn't banking on a deceased organ donor. He's looking for a living donor – someone willing to sacrifice a portion of his or her healthy liver, the only organ in the human body that regenerates.
He eases his body onto the sturdy green recliner, leans back, resting his head near a crocheted blanket that's draped over the chair.
His ankles are swollen, his stomach as big as a basketball from water retention. His liver barely functions after 20 years of living with the hepatitis C he contracted the night he tried to save the little girl.
He stays off his feet most of the time. He has adopted a low-sodium diet and drinks homemade juices made from fresh fruits and vegetables every day between 11 a.m. and noon. Hot baths every morning and night soothe the cramping in his legs.
Most Sundays, Beach can't go to church because being around lots of people is exhausting. Worse, he could catch something that would further weaken his body. Occasionally, he walks to the end of his road or makes the drive to the grocery store with his wife, staying inside the car as she shops.
Beach is only 52. He wants to return to work as an investigative lieutenant with the Smithfield Police Department. He wants the strength to go back to Smithfield Assembly of God, the church where he volunteers as the sound man for worship services and other occasions. He wants the next 25 years with his wife, Kathie, to be just as good as the first quarter-century.
For more than a decade, Beach took trial drugs and tried other procedures. His body never responded to the experimental treatments. Still, he watched others with liver trouble die while he lived.
"God's hands have been on him all these years," Kathie Beach says, glancing at her husband.
At Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond, where Beach is being treated, about 140 patients need a new liver. Doctors at VCU's Hume-Lee Transplant Center performed the second adult-to-adult living-donor liver transplant in the nation in 1998, said April Ashworth, coordinator of the center's liver transplant and living-donor programs. Since then, they've done about 110 of the living-donor surgeries.
"It's really another option for a patient, and it decreases the waiting time," Ashworth said.
Patients in search of a living liver donor must find someone who is healthy with a similar build, has a matching blood type, and meets other criteria. Ashworth screens potential donors over the phone for at least 30 to 45 minutes. Those who pass travel to Richmond for three to four days of medical test ing.
Hume-Lee doesn't keep a list of people willing to be living liver donors. With each case, someone – usually a family member – must be willing to step up to the plate.
It's a lot to ask, Ashworth said, for an otherwise healthy person to volunteer for a 10- to 12-hour surgery. Odds are they'll make it out alive, but you never know. So the center takes a "conservative" approach when identifying donors, taking every step to rule out those with pre-existing medical problems.
"We wouldn't even do this procedure if we had enough deceased donor organs," Ashworth said.
During the surgery, doctors remove 50 to 60 percent of the donor's liver, which will regenerate within two to four weeks. The recipient's old liver is then replaced with the donated organ.
If things go as planned, the donor will be out of the hospital in five to six days. But work is out of the question for at least four weeks. Follow-up care, along with the initial evaluation and the surgery, are covered by the organ recipient's insurance.
Ken Schuler knows the drill. He donated a liver in 1999 – to a stranger, a 39-year-old women whose story he heard about from the television news.
Schuler, who lives in Linville, Va., endured a liver biopsy, chest X-rays, a meeting with a psychiatrist and other screenings before learning he was a match. He had the surgery in April and was back to normal three months later, his recovery hampered only by an unrelated kidney stone that developed.
At the time, people called Schuler crazy. They asked, why would you risk your life for someone you've never met?
"It was like seeing someone drowning," he said. "You don't worry about whether the water's cold."
The words stung: "unfit for duty." The message, delivered by Beach's doctor in early fall, was no easy pill to swallow for a police lieutenant who's a former able-bodied seaman and Virginia Marine Police captain.
It started in May with a trip to the Sentara Obici Hospital emergency room. There were more hospital visits, many more. Beach learned his liver was in the advanced stages of cirrhosis.
"My liver function was not anywhere close to where it should be," he said. "The rest of me was in good health: my heart, my lungs."
Nothing's been the same since. Beach tried to work at first but he tired quickly. Words, names, other details once ever-present in Beach's sharp mind began to escape him as his ammonia levels fluctuated.
His wife – "the love of my life and my best friend," Beach says – has to handle the bills now.
So many friends and strangers, more than Beach could have imagined, have called to offer to be donors. Co-workers have said they'll donate their sick leave. Community members opened a bank account to help Beach pay for medical bills not covered by insurance.
If Beach finds a living-donor match, it's likely he'll be in the hospital about two weeks. But the doctors will monitor his progress for a lifetime. They'll give him anti-rejection medication so his body will accept the new liver. But it might be a fight.
And even if Beach's body wins that battle, it might not be able to keep the hepatitis C from destroying his new liver.
Beach reaches next to his recliner to retrieve his Bible. He wants to read aloud the third chapter of James, verse 13 . It's a passage that's touched him during recent devotionals.
Beach peers through his rectangular-framed glasses, perched on a face that's gaunt and yellowed with jaundice.
"Who is wise and understanding among you?" he reads. "Let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom."
Hattie Brown Garrow, (757) 222-5562, [email protected]