‘The Gift of Life’: Thurston County Woman Travels Across Country to Donate Portion of Liver

“My parents won’t have to bury their daughter …”

Early in the morning on Thursday, Oct. 29, Kelly Cornwall — donor — and Amy Lynn Weiss — recipient — will be lying on surgical gurneys in the pre-op waiting area at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).

Until now, they have lived separate lives 2,523 miles apart with little hint the other existed. They may be pondering such circumstances as they wait — side by side — in the antiseptic surgery staging area, the last stop before their lives forever entwine.

Cornwall, 39, and Weiss, 45, may have a few final words together as they wait, or they may pray, or cry, or hold hands — it’s hard to know, of course, when you’re waiting — hearts beating as one — for nurses to wheel you into nearby operating rooms.

Weiss, a single Pittsburgh mom with two kids, should have died a year ago, doctors told her. The more than 100 cysts that over the past four years have invaded her liver, ovaries, kidneys and abdomen have transformed her life into a grotesque, excruciating hell. 

Her liver, Weiss wrote last week in an email to the Nisqually Valley News, has grown so that it now sticks out beyond her ribs, below her pelvis and out her back.

“They cannot tackle my other organs to work on those cysts until my liver is gone, because it is so big they cannot see them and they are getting squeezed by my ever-growing liver,” Weiss wrote. “So with my liver being how it is, it’s a Catch 22 with my other organs, and these multiplying cysts with my liver is what makes it fatal.”

A liver transplant was her only hope — and in June Weiss finally made it onto the national liver transplant list. 

Enter Yelm resident Kelly Cornwall, a married mother of four who has earned a part-time living since 2013 accompanying on piano the choirs at Yelm High School and South Puget Sound Community College. And in a roundabout way, it was through her music that she first learned about Weiss.

Cornwall, who earned a bachelor’s of music degree in organ performance from Washington State University in 2006, studied for four years under then WSU choir professor John Weiss and also knew Weiss’ wife Cheryl — but had never met their daughter Amy.

And, strangely enough, she still hasn’t.

When Cornwall — who communicates with John Weiss every year — discovered Amy’s affliction in January, it struck a chord in her heart and prompted her to ponder donating a portion of her healthy liver to replace Amy’s diseased one. 

By August, Cornwall had decided she wanted to proceed with the transplant, and by mid-September was in Pittsburgh for three days of evaluation to determine her donor suitability. 

“They were mostly checking to see how healthy my liver is and how well it functions,” she said. 

She passed the tests with flying colors and spent a day with John and Cheryl Weiss, but was unable to meet Amy during the stay because she wasn’t feeling well. 

Since then, though, Weiss and Cornwall have regularly texted back and forth as their fateful day grew near.

Weiss’ gratitude flows from her texts, this one from Oct. 23: “This is such a gift,” she wrote. “I am so blessed and so thankful to you. I’ve learned to never take anything for granted.”

And another text the next day: “I owe you my life.”

Given the enormity of her decision and how it has affected Weiss, Cornwall is nevertheless at peace with her commitment and hasn’t spent much time examining the “what ifs.”  

“I didn’t ask questions,” Cornwall said last week from the Yelm home she shares with Adam, 41, her husband of 18 years, and their four children ages 8 to 14. “I saw the need and wanted to fill it. And I knew it was a big decision, but it felt like the right thing to do. From the very beginning I just knew I was the right one, and I had to do this.”

The Cornwalls, who are both members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, reached the decision in harmonious tranquility.

“What it all came down to is that the entire process seemed right the whole time. I feel peace and comfort that she (Kelly) is being watched over,” Adam said.

Added Kelly: “We are Christians to the core. We believe in doing the same things Jesus Christ would do if he were here. I believe by doing this for someone I’ve never met is a perfect example of what being a Christian really means.”

Cornwall’s altruism has overwhelmed Weiss.

“My first feeling is grateful, blessed, and honored ...” she wrote. “My kids will have a mom now. I no longer will wonder if every day is my last … My parents won’t have to bury their daughter. This is all thanks to Kelly. She is my and my family’s guardian angel. I’m overcome with gratitude. She is giving me the gift of life.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those gifts are relatively rare. The most commonly transplanted organs, the CDC noted on its website, are kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, pancreas and intestines.

“On any given day, there are around 75,000 people on the active waiting list for organs, but only around 8,000 deceased organ donors each year, with each providing on average 3.5 organs,” the site explained. “Living donors provide on average only around 6,000 organs per year.”

And though the approximately seven-hour surgery doesn’t come without risks, Cornwall concluded that the positives much outweighed the negatives — of which she could name only two that concerned her.

First, the surgeons must remove her gallbladder, which Cornwall said would be attached to the 60 percent of her liver they will transfer to Weiss. The gallbladder, incidentally, stores and concentrates bile, a digestive enzyme the liver produces. When signaled by a hormone, the 3 ½-inch long organ secretes bile into the small intestine and helps digest food by breaking up fats and draining waste from the liver.

So what that means to Cornwall is pretty simple: stop eating greasy, high-fat food.

“It’s really not a hard negative,” she said with a grin. “Until my body figures out how to function without a gallbladder I have to be careful what I eat.”

Fatigue is the second negative. 

Cornwall expects to be exhausted until her body regenerates her liver, which she said should take from eight to 12 weeks. According to the Mayo Clinic, the liver has the greatest regenerative capacity of any organ in the body.

“The negatives are adjustments, so if I have a positive attitude they’re not really negatives,” Cornwall said. “It’s just temporary.”

Cornwall expects to be in Pittsburgh recovering from surgery for about two weeks and should arrive back home on Nov. 11. Weiss’ health insurance will cover the cost of the transplant, and a grant from the National Living Donor Assistance Center is paying for Cornwall’s travel expenses. UPMC will monitor Cornwall for two years afterward to ensure her liver is functioning properly, she said. 

In the meantime, she has been “hyper focused on what I have to do to get my family ready for me to be gone.”

Husband Adam has been at the forefront of her thoughts, because he will have his hands full while she’s gone. He teaches technology, robotics, and band at Rainier High School and Middle School, and COVID-19 has thrown a huge monkey wrench into his normal routine as it has most teachers in the district.

“It’s insane now, because I’m trying to teach hands-on, lab-style classes virtually,” he said.

And, of course, he has four kids at home to shepherd as they cope with online classes. So to help in any way she can, Cornwall removed one huge responsibility from her husband’s plate: She prepared two and a half weeks worth of frozen Crock-Pot family meals — from marinated chicken with rice to enchiladas and pork dishes.

She’s quick to note, however, that Adam’s entirely self sufficient when the need arises.

“Adam is really good at being Mr. Mom,” she said, “because I usually work six weeks every summer.”

Mr. Mom will also be tasked with ensuring the couple’s four kids don’t worry too much about real Mom while she’s away. And in that sense, COVID-19 — in a rare silver lining — has helped mitigate Adam’s burden.

“I think COVID has allowed this to happen a bit more easily, because I have been able to work from home if I need to,” he explained. 

Added Kelly: “And I’m not working (because of COVID-19), so it’s the perfect time.”

Spencer Cornwall, the couple’s oldest boy at age 12, seems to be taking Mom’s situation in stride, though he has conflicting emotions.

“I’m kind of worried that she will be incapacitated for life or something crazy like that,” he said. “But I’m confident she will be healthy when she comes home, and there is an extremely low chance she will be hurt.”

Spencer’s older sister Mackenzie, 14, is confident Mom will be OK, and besides it offers her an opportunity to seize the moment.

“I’m kind of glad she’ll be gone for a while, because it gives me the chance to develop skills I’ll need when I’m older — like cooking,” she said. “I think it’s kind of cool she’s doing this even though she doesn’t know if the other person will take care of the liver she’s given.”

Cornwall doesn’t seem to have fretted a second about that, and has, in fact, tried to stay level headed and worry about the most important things first.

Like Halloween.

The ghosts and goblins night occurs two days after her transplant surgery, which prompted Cornwall to surmise she’d dress up like a patient — and then realized like a conk to the head that an even more obvious costume suited her.

“I was going to be a patient,” she said, “but then I decided on being chopped liver, instead.”