Jesse and Nick Faris have waited one long year for a call they weren’t sure would ever come.
On February 24, 2016, they got that phone call.
Their 2-year-old daughter Brooklyn, who they adopted from China a year ago, was finally #1 on the liver transplant list at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago.
Brooklyn has Alagille syndrome, a genetic disorder that stops the liver from cleaning waste out of the bloodstream, and she desperately needed this transplant to survive.
But within moments, the Faris’ excitement turned into sheer terror. They quickly discovered that every single flight to Chicago had been canceled because of a blizzard, and they had no way to get their daughter to the hospital for her 10 a.m. operation the next morning.
They thought about using other means of transportation, but time was critical, and the trip was well over 500 miles from their location in Memphis to Chicago.
“We considered driving or taking a train, but we were worried we wouldn’t get there on time,” they told Us Weekly. “It would have been $10,000 to charter a plane, and we couldn’t handle that financially.”
That’s when a family friend of theirs, John Carrol, decided to contact St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital to see if there was anything they could do to help.