Chapters Transcript Video After 10-Year Wait, Teenager Celebrates a New Kidney It has been a very long and difficult health journey for Mary Ashley Barbo and her family. The South Carolina teenager has been on dialysis and waiting for a kidney since childhood. It's been 10 years in the making. We she was born with a congenital kidney defect and we first transplanted her at 18 months, started to go into rejection due to some complications that did not go so well and we lost the kidneys. What made her case so difficult was the extreme amount of antibodies her body was producing. We look at the extent of antibodies and we have a spectrum. 0% means that there are no antibodies and 100% means that there are so many antibodies, you know, that's not beyond that. And when Mary Ashley came to us, she was 99.9% and therefore she was a very, very difficult candidate to find another kidney that would match well with her body in order to be able to like accept it. But Mary Ashley and her family never gave up hope developmentally delayed with limited speech. Mary Ashley shows her personality with bright hair colors and Hollywood themed betting why do you like a year ago, they came to Cedar Sinai for its renowned desensitizing program which lowers the antibody levels and helps candidates like Mary Ashley receive transplants. I hoped and prayed that it would happen and I worked diligently every day trying to get organ donor awareness out there. We did social media news stories, everything to get the awareness out there because we never gave up hope that we would find a match for her. Thanks to the desensitization protocol. Mary Ashley was able to receive a kidney this past September, we got a call. Finally, after 10 years of waiting, we were admitted to the pediatric floor and she was off to the or this is Mary Ashley walking for the first time after her transplant. Oh my goodness for the first time. And this is Mary Ashley today, a full inch taller and full of life at her six month checkup, Mary Ashley had hugs and gifts for her favorite doctors and nurses in good health. For the first time in a decade, she took in a Clippers game, her first ever pro sports event and a VIP tour of the Warner Brothers studio lot. Mary Ashley is doing fab. She is vibrant. She's excited about every day. We can barely get through one day before she's asking what can we do tomorrow? What are we going to do tomorrow? She's just full of life and energy and excitement in my mind. This was almost a last ditch effort. And I think she's extremely lucky because the amount of antibodies that she had, um, would have made it almost impossible for her to get a transplant somewhere. Even at cedars, I think she was extremely lucky because sometimes it's almost impossible to find a match. And the fact that we actually found it after her being on dialysis for more than 10 years is like, it's beyond winning a lot, or even in my opinion. Created by
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