Health The miracle goes on
NNSL (OCT 23/96) - Joan Schollar is a walking miracle. The 44-year-old underwent a liver transplant two years ago that gave her a second chance at life.

"I wouldn't be alive today without the transplant," she says.

Schollar was diagnosed five years ago with primary biliary cirrhosis, a chronic liver disease that destroys the body's bile ducts. With only a year left to live, she was placed on a waiting list for a transplant for three months at the Stanton Yellowknife Hospital.

While waiting, she lost more than 30 kilograms and was struggling to stay alive.

As luck would have it, she got a call Nov. 27, 1994 from the co-ordinator of liver transplants in Edmonton and was immediately flown there for the operation.

Photographs that document her recovery are a harsh contrast to how the healthy Schollar looks today.

Barely recognizable in the photographs, she's gaunt with tubes coming out of her nose, attaching her to a room full of machines.

"Sometimes it's hard to even think that it happened," she says. "It's one of those things that you can hardly believe."

She says the support of her husband Lorne and two children Dale, 20, and Geraldine, 22 was never-ending.

After the transplant, she couldn't walk or even get out of bed.

She had three weeks of rehabilitation at the Glenrose Centre in Edmonton where she learned to walk again with a walker.

There were a lot of ups and downs, with numerous reactions to drugs and countless rejections to her new liver.

She just stopped taking steroids in July, but she'll have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life.

"That's not a major imposition on my life," she says.

Almost fully recovered, she is now working to rebuild muscle that has weakened after 18 months of steroid use.

"It's an incredible feeling to have a second chance on life," she says. "It truly is a miracle."