Clara’s Respiratory Recovery Fund

Clara’s Respiratory Recovery Fund

In August 2021 during the summer between her sophomore and junior year at DePaul university, Clara was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia at Northwestern Hospital. She endured treatment twice, achieved remission twice, and participated in onco-fertility, freezing 13 eggs for future use. She self diagnosed her relapse. She battled Covid. She overcame her challenges and healed. She looked to her future.

Aiming to protect her future, in September 2022, Clara bravely transferred to Lurie Children’s hospital for a stem cell transplant. She wanted to be surrounded with other young people during this intimidating procedure. Her brother George was a perfect match. And in February of 2023 Clara and her stem cell transplant doctors can celebrate successful engraftment. Clara is clear of cancer. Her chimerism and follow up bone marrow biopsy results are perfect. Clara and her stem cell team succeeded.

This is when Clara’s experience took a turn for the worse. During engraftment Clara’s lungs suffered a mysterious inflammation. In October she was moved to the PICU floor and intubated. PICU has no clear diagnosis for her lung inflammation.

While in PICU she contracted adenovirus and yet Clara persisted in overcoming the challenges. She continued attending rounds with her team, using her cell phone to communicate with the team and family. In December of 2022 the doctors told her parents, Eve and Max, that they were prepping Clara for a lung transplant at Northwestern. She was put on ECMO, Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation on December 9, 2022.

Confusingly, shortly after putting her on ECMO, the PICU team informed them that Clara would not in fact be eligible for a lung transplant until October 2024 because of her cancer history.

And yet Clara has persisted in healing. She has recovered strength and continues to improve every day, participating in physical therapy, feeding herself, making jokes, working on her hobby of building keyboards, and talking to doctors. And Northwestern has promised to reconsider her as a candidate for lung transplant in early March thanks to the advocacy of her stem cell team.

Despite this, on February 21 Luries’ PICU attending doctor for the week told Clara that her life support was showing signs of failure, and he would not replace it. PICU will not continue her life support. Clara wept. Her persistence and fight for life does not matter.

Now, over 18 months into Clara’s health crisis, she and her family need support. Despite excellent insurance and a supportive workplace, mom has been on a largely unpaid leave of absence since December and Clara needs legal representation immediately. And long term the medical bills are hefty.

Please help. Donations large & small are essential to help Clara and her family navigate next steps to protect Clara. No amount is too small. Regardless of your own capacity to give, please consider doing two more things for Clara & her family in this surreal world of modern medicine: pass along this GoFundMe story. And donate blood.

Thank you for reading this summary. More details can be found in Clara’s Caring Bridge. And thank you for anything you can do to help.

A CaringBridge Site was created for Clara . It‘s a caring social network to help people stay connected with family and friends during a health event.

Visit Clara 's Site: https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/clarajeanne

Site Name: clarajeanne