Reja Von Klopp
Reja Von Klopp
In May 2006, Renee and John Von Klopp brought Reja home from the hospital – from all appearances she was a happy and healthy newborn baby. The family had moved into a new house a month before Reja was born and they were looking forward to spending their first Christmas together in the new house. When she was four months old, however, things started to change.
The Tuesday before Labor Day, they took Reja to see her pediatrician for jaundice. The next day, they met with Dr. Nissa Erickson, a gastrointestinal specialist, who recommended exploratory surgery. At four months old, Reja was diagnosed with biliary atresia - a rare disease of the liver and bile ducts that affects 1 in 15,000 babies – mostly girls. Symptoms of the disease start to develop about two to eight weeks after birth.
With biliary atresia, the flow of bile from the liver to the gallbladder is blocked. This causes the bile to be trapped inside the liver, quickly causing damage and scarring of the liver cells, and finally liver failure. There are treatments for the disease, but most babies require a liver transplant.
On the day before Labor Day, surgeons tried to repair Reja’s bile ducts to help buy a little time before a liver was available, but the surgery was unsuccessful. Reja was placed on the organ transplant list and her parents began to wait, hoping for a matching donor to appear. “When we got the news, we thought ‘This isn’t good, but it should be easy to find a donor’ . . . but it wasn’t,” says Renee. Doctors wanted to find a liver that was the right size for Reja, and the right blood type. Since Reja was AB positive, finding the right blood type was more of a challenge.
When Reja was seven months old, her family received the good news – a matching liver had been found. She was in surgery for 10 hours, during which she clotted five times and to this day, the doctors still don’t know why. The doctors put her on a blood thinner to help reduce the clotting, which resulted in extra bleeding during and after the surgery.
During the surgery, Reja received up to three units of red blood cells, three units of plasma and four units of cryoprecipitate. Renee knows that without the generosity of anonymous blood donors, her daughter wouldn’t have survived her liver transplant, “Anything you can do helps.”
Immediately after the transplant, Reja wasn’t getting better and the doctors were going to put her on the emergency transplant list to find another liver if things didn’t turn around.
Luckily, the new liver was a success. She was released from the hospital on Christmas Day 2006. On her first Christmas, Reja was able to help open her presents and her family was able to celebrate the holiday in their new home with a child that had a bright future in front of her.
Reja is now happy and healthy. She loves spending her days going for walks and waving at the planes that fly over her home, sitting in a corner with her stuffed animals looking at books, and spending quality time with her big sister, Anja, in the sandbox.