A Kansas woman suffered liver failure and was given just three months to live after her symptoms were mistaken for fatigue.
Doctors said 39-year-old Kahley Schiller’s constant physical and mental exhaustion was just the result of her busy lifestyle as a mother of two young children and a small business owner.
The mother of two was so breathless and plagued by intense waves of nausea that she could barely finish teaching classes in her Pilates studio.
When Mrs. Schiller’s eyes turned bright yellow due to jaundice, doctors realized that her liver was not working properly and rushed her to the hospital.
A biopsy found that his liver was failing rapidly due to undiagnosed autoimmune hepatitis, a chronic disease that causes the immune system to attack liver cells.
After two days of failed steroids, doctors warned that if he did not receive a liver transplant, he would have only had 90 days to live.
Schiller, now 44, told DailyMail.com: ‘I felt very numb. I was just hanging on to survive.’
Kahley Schiller (pictured), 44, of Kansas, suffered advanced liver failure due to autoimmune hepatitis in 2019. Doctors gave her only 90 days to live if she did not receive a transplant.
Autoimmune hepatitis occurs in approximately one in 25,000 Americans.
It’s not clear why this happens, but it leads the body to think the liver is harmful, causing it to attack healthy tissue.
If left untreated, the damage can lead to permanent scarring of the liver called cirrhosis and organ failure. At this stage, the only treatment is a transplant.
Schiller said all of his enzymes were normal during routine blood tests he had a few months earlier, suggesting his condition progressed rapidly, even though he didn’t know he had it.
Many patients like her can go years without being diagnosed due to mild symptoms that are confused with other causes.
While Mrs. Schiller waited for a liver, her appetite completely disappeared, her throat burned and she “felt so full.”
All the muscle tone he had built with Pilates had disintegrated and he gained 30 pounds due to the steroids and fluid retention, caused by pressure building in the veins that supply blood to the liver.
The active mother of two (pictured with her two children before and after diagnosis) was forced to start putting her will and other matters in order while she waited for a liver.
Although she was sent home to wait for the new organ, she was so weak that she could barely walk down stairs or drive.
As his body shut down, Schiller quickly moved to the top of the University of Kansas Health System’s transplant list, but he also faced the difficult task of getting his affairs in order in case the transplant never happened. will arrive
She said: ‘I started making arrangements and getting powers.
“I didn’t want to not do the right thing because there’s really no guarantee whether you’ll get a transplant or not.”
According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, more than 100,000 Americans are waiting for an organ on the national transplant list, and 17 die each day waiting for a transplant.
In September, 9,500 people in the United States were waiting for a liver transplant, the second most in-demand organ behind kidneys.
However, only 33,000 living and deceased Americans are registered as organ donors.
In October 2019, a month and a half after his diagnosis, Schiller received a call informing him that a liver was finally available. She found herself sobbing all the way to the hospital, but not from emotion.
She said: ‘It’s really challenging because, in my situation, I was waiting for someone to pass away to live. That’s a really difficult concept to rationalize.”
During surgery, Mrs. Schiller suffered a blood clot that caused a pulmonary embolism, a blockage in one of her lung arteries.
The clot then traveled to his heart, where it passed through a hole called a patent foramen ovale (PFO).
While everyone is born with a PFO, in most patients it closes shortly after birth. But in one in four people the hole remains open.
Normally this is harmless, but Mrs Schiller’s blood clot passed through her PFO and traveled to her brain, causing four minor strokes while she was on the operating table.
Doctors were forced to stop the transplant and insert a filter into the inferior vena cava (IVC) to help prevent further clotting. She had to remain sedated for 24 hours before the team could complete her transplant. The liver remained viable during all complications.
He woke up more than 30 hours after the surgery began.
Mrs Schiller suffered a blood clot during her liver transplant that traveled to her lungs, heart and brain, causing four minor strokes. She spent two weeks in the hospital (pictured left in bed and right with her husband and mother) recovering.
Mrs Schiller, pictured here five years after her transplant, told DailyMail.com: “I never want to go through this again because it was really challenging.” However, it has improved me in many ways and helped me overcome my insecurities.’
Schiller said: “I woke up very confused, not understanding why I was awake the next day compared to about six hours after a normal transplant surgery.
‘A lot of emotions were filled with all that because now I had new doctors. Now I had a neurologist, now I had a cardiologist who came to check on me, as well as surgeons who operated on me and a hematologist.
‘It was really overwhelming. Once I woke up, in addition to feeling the worst pain I have ever experienced in my life, now being bombarded with all this information, it was a lot of emotions that just came out. “I was still hopeful, but there was a lot to process.”
Schiller spent two weeks in the hospital and returned home with a wishbone-shaped scar that stretched across his abdomen.
He also suffered from debilitating lower back pain, as well as migraines from the strokes that were so severe they lasted for up to 12 days at a time. But immediately after arriving home, he began working on regaining strength with short walks on the treadmill.
Shown here is Mrs. Schiller’s scar from her liver transplant.
Mrs Schiller told DailyMail.com: ‘Every day he got better. Every day was something incredible. I could see the color of my skin come back to life. My eyes started to turn white. The liquid began to leave my body.
‘When your body starts to deteriorate so quickly, it’s like a plant that starts to die. But then you decide to give it one more chance and start watering it and giving it love and whatever it needs.
‘That’s what your body does; comes back to life and blooms again after receiving a new organ.
“It was quite fascinating to watch, to see my body literally come back to life.”
In the months after her transplant, Mrs. Schiller was able to use Pilates “to completely rehabilitate my core and my entire body,” but it took about a year “to feel physically and emotionally normal again.”
“I was determined. I just wanted to feel strong again,” he added.
Now, five years after the transplant, Schiller is back to doing Pilates regularly and running four to five times a week. He takes anti-rejection medications to prevent his body from rejecting the new liver and has blood tests every month to monitor his enzymes.
She also avoids alcohol and avoids grapefruit and pomegranate because they interact with her anti-rejection medications.
She said: “I basically recovered again.”
“I don’t want to go through this again because it was really challenging. However, it has improved me in many ways and helped me overcome my insecurities.
“It really helped me realize how precious life is.”