‘The gift of life:’ Patients in CT facing organ failure share struggles, the urgent need for donors

CT Insider – Monday, April 21, 2025
By Cris Villalonga-Vivoni

Looking in the mirror to see yellow eyes staring back at her was what prompted Saucier “Sandy” Archer to go to her doctor’s office in the first place.

The yellowing started as small spots in the corner of her eyes, growing with each day as her unknown condition worsened. It wasn’t long before Archer’s eyes and her olive-tone skin were jaundiced, showing early symptoms of liver problems.

Archer, of Haddam, lives with daily symptoms of primary biliary cholangitis, a chronic liver disease impacting the bile duct. Her symptoms range from severe fatigue to joint pain to bruising so dark “no kind of makeup…can cover it.”

There’s no cure, so Archer’s hope for a full recovery is waiting for an organ donation, either through a live transplant or from the national transplant waitlist that she joined in 2022. Although Archer’s condition has stabilized, she is still one of the over 103,000 people nationwide waiting for the same gift of life, according to U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

“Unless things progress and go back to being worse, I’m just holding my own and taking my medications and just waiting to see if we find a donor,” Archer said, while struggling to find a live donor match.

Each organ is different in its makeup and function, so how they are distributed across the national waitlist naturally varies, too, said Dr. Morgan Glyn, chief of transplant surgery at Hartford HealthCare.

Some major organs — like the liver, heart and lungs — are allocated based on a “sickest first policy,” meaning the patient who is sickest and is a biological match is typically the first on the list when the organ becomes available.

Kidneys, specifically, have a different waitlist priority system because many patients can treat kidney failure with dialysis, an intense treatment that helps clean their blood from toxins, Glyn said. He described it as the “great equalizer” because it allows patients to reach some sense of stability.

“You have the option to fall back. It’s not a great life, but at least you’re not going to lose your life,” Glyn said. “Whereas a liver, there is no equivalent. You either get a transplant or you’re going to die and so that’s why the system works the way it does.”

If a patient’s condition stabilizes with treatment, Glyn said they could be on the transplant waitlist for months or years at a time. Others may be taken off the list since the surgery is sometimes riskier than daily symptoms and disease progression.

What adds to the transplant wait time is the availability of healthy organs.

Organ donors typically are deceased individuals who either volunteered to donate their organs before death or their family made the decision on their behalf, according to the nonprofit Cleveland Clinic. To be eligible, the donor needs to be declared dead by a cause that doesn’t damage the organs, like severe brain injury or sudden cardiac arrest.

The number of available organs has grown, but only about 2% of hospital deaths meet organ donation criteria, said Sean Fitzpatrick, chief public affairs officer for the New England Donor Service, which coordinates organ and tissue donation in Connecticut and other northeastern states.

Last year, for example, Connecticut saw a record number of deceased organ donors with 166, Fitzpatrick said. An estimated 45% of Connecticut adults are registered organ donors, which is slightly lower than the national average.

“The likelihood is that you will not die in a way that makes donation possible because of its rarity. However, that means it’s even more important that as many people register as possible because each opportunity for donation means a life-saving transplant to somebody,” he said.

Finding a match

The transplant waitlist is a Catch-22 for Archer and others on the list, knowing that the faster someone moves up the list, the sicker they are.
As a relatively active teenager, Archer was diagnosed with high cholesterol and a fatty liver, a condition where excess fat builds up in the liver.

She said this didn’t have any particular impact on her daily life, especially after starting cholesterol medication. It wasn’t until a few years ago that Archer noticed the yellowing jaundice of her eyes and skin.

Archer said the first doctor she saw misdiagnosed her with alcohol cirrhosis despite not being a heavy drinker. The doctors suggested that her condition would improve in six to nine months if she gave up alcohol, but Archer said it never did despite following his advice.

Instead, Archer experienced many daily symptoms like low blood sugar, yellow eyes and skin, low energy, an upset stomach and regular, excessive nosebleeds. She never wanted to go out in public because some of her symptoms were so visible, like the bruising that would form around her eyes.

She was officially diagnosed with primary biliary cholangitis, also known as PCB, in August 2022 and was added to the liver transplant waitlist.

Although there is no cure for PCB, Archer said she manages her symptoms with medication that has helped her return to a sense of normalcy while she waits for a donated liver to become available.

Archer is also cleared for a live transplant if she finds a donor match.

Performing live transplants when possible is preferred, Glyn said. Organs from live donors tend to be stronger, healthier, and more likely to last. He said it also ensures that patients aren’t waiting years for a potential donor, but finding a live match can be tricky.

Liver donations, however, are rarer because they are a more complicated procedure, and the tests to match liver donors are extensive, as Archer and her family quickly found out.

Finding a donor whose liver matches Archer’s has been difficult. Not only have her siblings and husband been screened, but Archer said a number of her husband’s co-workers also went through the screening process but weren’t a match for one reason or another.

The screening process involves a series of tests of the donor’s body, taking in factors like weight, chronic conditions and anatomy. Her husband, Shawn Archer, said he did everything to prepare for the transplant screening, like losing weight and eating a strict diet to ensure his liver was healthy for the screening.

Despite his best efforts, doctors determined they weren’t a donation match. Shawn Archer said essentially, the inner “plumbing” of each of their livers didn’t line up, which no amount of weight loss or exercise could change.

It’s nerve-wracking, Shawn Archer said, to watch his wife in pain and receive another call from a friend who went through the testing process and wasn’t a match.

“She’s gonna need a liver. She’s OK now… but when it comes down to that point where she starts to get really sick, and then she’ll be higher up on the deceased list,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to, obviously, stay away from.”

The gift of life

It was midnight one September night in 2013 when the phone rang with the news that Ghaneshwari “Priya” Ramdas had been waiting seven years for — “We have a kidney available.”

At the time, Ramdas was having dialysis treatment three times a week to treat her progressive kidney failure over seven years. Her condition started young, she said, having her first surgery at 12 years old and her second a few years later to remove one of her damaged kidneys.

Ramdas has lived with one kidney since, achieving several milestones, like moving to Hartford from Guyana in South America with her family, and marrying her childhood sweetheart, who moved with them.

When she was 21 years old, Ramdas said the pain returned, which is when the doctors added her to the kidney transplant waitlist. She was also diagnosed with congestive heart failure and was added to the transplant list for her heart.

She relied on dialysis treatments multiple times a week to filter out the toxins from her body. Still, Ramdas dealt with nearly daily symptoms, like fluctuating low weight, severe fatigue, and more.

Ramdas said her husband would carry her in and out of their third-floor apartment because her health made it difficult to walk upstairs. When she’d come home from dialysis, she’d spend the rest of the day sleeping, exhausted by the treatment.

“People don’t realize how hard it is and what you have to go through, and the steps you have to take and the steps that you have to follow,” Ramdas said.

Although family members offered to donate their kidney to Ramdas, she said she wanted to wait for an organ, knowing how difficult it can be to live with just one kidney. So, she couldn’t believe it when the call finally came.

Technically, Ramdas was the backup organ recipient if the primary refused the donation or wasn’t a match. She said the other patient ultimately wasn’t a match for the donor and she was “lucky enough” to be next in line. The organ was anonymously donated, but providers told her that her “gift of life” came from a child who passed away.

She said the transplant ultimately made it possible for Ramdas to live her life to its fullest extent again.

Not only was she now free from daily pain and intense treatment, but Ramdas said she could fully pursue her lifelong dream of acting and modeling, showing up in a handful of primetime shows, commercials and music videos.

To treat the congestive heart failure, Ramdas said doctors implanted a defibrillator and pacemaker, which has helped stabilize her heart enough to take her off the transplant list. She added that her heart condition improved after the transplant too.

Ramdas also gave birth to her son, Austin, six years after recovering from the transplant.

Despite the relief the transplant has provided, Ramdas, now 42, said she still goes to doctor appointments for blood work, takes medication regularly and follows a diet to keep herself healthy.

“This is not my story. This is our story. It’s not only about me but my family too. They helped me out to get where I am today,” she said. “Because of a person who donated their organ, I get to live a healthier life, and I get to bring life to this earth.”

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