Anyone who remembers this day in 2001 knows what a hard day it was.
But even on the toughest days, there are sometimes moments of magic.
While all of the horror – and bravery in the face of it – took place in Manhattan, Washington DC and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, there was an amazing story unfolding far from those sites… an effort to help a six month old baby get a transplant that would save her life.
This little one was known as Kareena, and she had been born without a functioning liver.
In September 2001 she was in rough shape at a Houston hospital; doctors said it would take a transplant to keep her alive, and it had to happen quickly.
There was a liver available, which for someone in Kareena’s position was a rare enough thing.
A family in Nashville whose baby hadn’t made it had donated the child’s organ.
I don’t want to say getting a liver from here to there is in any way routine, but on a typical day this would have been pretty doable: they could put the donor liver on a plane from Tennessee to Texas while doctors got ready for transplant surgery.
Of course, this was anything but a typical day.
As the attacks on the United States unfolded, the government grounded nearly every plane in the sky.
The liver that baby Kareena needed so badly might not be available in time after all.
But back in Nashville, Dr. Ravi Chari and his colleagues wasn’t ready to throw in the towel.
Chari was the surgeon who removed the liver from its donor, and he wanted that sacrifice to mean something.
As he put it later, “If we didn’t get this liver to this patient because of what the terrorists had done, the terrorists would in effect have killed someone else.”
He had his team reach out to the air traffic control in Nashville; they actually found the number for the tower in the phone book (!)
The tower, of course, couldn’t clear a flight on their own, but they talked to people, who talked to other people, who talked to more people.
Eventually the Federal Aviation Administration cleared a single flight to take the liver to Houston, on a C-130 plane flown by the Tennessee National Guard.
This is a plane big enough to carry a tank or a limousine, and here it was carrying a few volunteers and one liver on ice.
It got the job done: the flight was a success, and so was the transplant.
Baby Kareena got the liver she needed; she has since grown up and graduated from college, apparently fully healthy.
She has stayed almost completely out of the public eye, but in one of her very few public statements, she described herself as grateful and inspired by what happened on her behalf back in 2001.
“All these people who didn’t know this little baby, who had no connection with this child, worked together on a day that really tested our nation,” she said. “I’m so grateful and I feel incredibly lucky and I feel a duty to do my best every day.”
You can’t say it any better than that.
9/11 attacks nearly kept a life-saving organ from an infant. Here’s how we met the moment. (The Tennessean)