Ticvah Matumona

Ticvah Matumona

Transplant Type: 

LiverUpdate: We are thrilled to report that Ticvah received a liver transplant on December 4, 2019!

Dear friends and partners,

As year 2017 nears to its end, we'd like to take the time to provide you with a quick glimpse on the incredible journey of baby Ticvah Matumona towards overcoming liver failure and securing a future from the moment this heartwrenching story last caught your heed to now.

You shall recall that Ticvah was born in late 2016 with a liver condition in Kinshasa, the Congo, Africa's heartland. Ticvah was brought to the US for medical attention following a providential turn of events. As it became evident in early 2017 that her exclusive ticket to a possible future was a very expensive surgical procedure (liver transplant), many of you rallied around her cause and helped raise the first instalments of what is required for her to get a new liver. The costs associated to maintaining her while awaiting that sorely needed new organ were significantly high on those involved in her care at first and the family's personal resources were quasi nil. At the brink of despair, the family decided to move to the New England area in a quest for a miracle. 

The road ahead seemed at prime aboard doomed to butt into a deadend.

The high price the family had had to pay subsequent to this additional leap of faith was to risk everything and sleep in a shelter for the homeless in Portland, Maine along with a terminally ill child.

Before long, local community resources in Portland that heard about Ticvah's plight decided to make a difference. Whilst the family was removed from the shelter to a charity house, Ticvah started being seen on a very regular basis by local pediatricians and gastroenterologists. In just a week time, the leading hospital in the region helped bridge contact with the world-famed Massachussets General Hospital in Boston that incidentally pledged to provide Ticvah with a surgery at close to no cost. Meanwhile, with the help of a local church, the family has permanently settled in Maine and has been fraught with community support that met some of the greatest needs including housing, food and education for the oldest sibling.

As we're drafting this update, Ticvah is a regular patient at the Massachussets General Hospital (MGH) with outpatient follow-up at Maine Medical Center (MMC) and officially listed as an organ recipient. A few weeks ago, she was upper in UNOS' waiting list given her current levels of illness.Baby Ticvah, previously acclaimed by all for her beautiful dark African hair and firy eyes has recently suffered hairloss, potentially due to some of the medications she's on to help maintain her liver functions. On a weekly basis, she attends to her appointments for blood draw and every single episode of hazardous fluctuation in the stability of her liver has been dealt with spontaneously and conjointly between MGH and MMC. 

Looking ahead, although Ticvah currently has a ticket to the transplant, the funds we're raising for her represent a safety net for her way forward as the post-transplant period will require for her to be on an aweful lot of antirejection drugs whose costs are known to be prohibitive. Your contributions, held by the National Foundation for Transplants, represent that safeguard for post transplant medications and the lengthy list of expenses corolary to follow-up and continuum of treatment.Often times, just as Bono from U2 once noted, "people die simply because of where they were born." 

The Congo, where Ticvah was born, is one of those places whose infants oft come to this world smitten with crippling disadvantages. But by means of your invaluable contributions, you have taken to task that sad reality and helped embody that global generosity needed to prove that sometimes people can also get to live simply because of whence they were born, so much so as the place of their birth happens to be our shared and endeared single planet.

For more direct updates, feel free to contact the father at: lukeinafrica@yahoo.fr.

Thanks again for your potent generosity! Ticvah shall live!

Patient Health Institute: Massachussets General Hospital in Boston