Friends recall life of organ recipient

Friends recall life of organ recipient

Gary Pettus • gpettus@clarionledger.com •
February 21, 2010

In November, four people received organs from an
unidentified donor who had a rare, undetected
parasite.

Two of those recipients have done well to this day.

Another patient, identified only as a 27-year-old
Alabama man, remains at the University of
Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, where he
received a kidney. His condition was recently
upgraded from critical to serious.

The fourth, 31-year-old Ellecia Small of Canton,
who also received a kidney at UMC, endured a
lengthy illness before she was removed from life
support.

She died Feb. 3. This is her story.

She wasn't supposed to eat M&Ms, but she did
anyway sometimes.

Ellecia Small was tired of doing without sweets, tired
of being hooked up every other day to a machine
that washed out her blood like dirty water, tired of
needles that pricked holes in her life.

As a diabetic and kidney dialysis patient, she was
just tired.

Until November, when she got the call.

"She finally got her kidney," said Moses Gordon, 32,
of Canton, her cousin and childhood friend.

"No more getting on the machine. No more pricking
holes in her arms. She came home. She asked my
mom to fix her some greens."

Small believed her new kidney would make her
happier and healthier, allow her to eat her favorite
foods, fill the holes in her life.

It did, for about two days.

"She called me, said she was feeling good," said
Tracie Wilson, 32, her friend and classmate at Velma
Jackson High School 14 years ago.

"She said, 'Spread the word; let all my sisters know
I'm ready to start doing their hair again.'

"That was the last time I talked to her."

Beautiful skin, beautiful hair - coal-black hair.

Friends, relatives, even her former teachers, pretty
much describe her the same way.

"Looked like a smile was built on her face," said
Leothas Nichols, her math teacher at Velma Jackson.

Wilson remembers the first time she saw Small, who
had transferred from another high school.

"She was the new student on the bus, and she
seemed kind of shy," said Wilson. "I decided to sit
down with her and find out more about her. She was
not shy at all."

Soon, they were eating breakfast together before
school every day - melted cheese on honeybuns.

"We had to have our talk. We had to have our
honeybuns. Then we were out the door," Wilson
said. "We were inseparable."

They dressed to the nines and took road trips
together, sometimes in "an old raggedly blue Nova"
Wilson's brother owned.

"The doors wouldn't open," Wilson said. "We got all
dressed up, looking good, and we had to climb in
and out of that car like the Dukes of Hazzard.

"When we stopped at a gas station, Lee would say,
'You go first.' Then we'd both climb out and people
would be looking at us, and she's laughing the
whole time."

Not all the memories were pleasant.

"I knew she was a diabetic, like I am," said Earnestine
Hamlin, who taught Small home economics.

"We talked about that a lot - how we ate, what we
should and should not eat."

Still, for many years after high school, Small's life
was relatively unhampered by her condition.

Six years ago, her son, Ellis, was born.

"She wanted that baby so much," said her friend
Autumn Chinn of Canton, "and she got him."

Small attended cosmetology school, and did her
girlfriends' hair at her home on Pisgah Bottom Road
in Canton, brooking no back talk when it came to
her creations.

"I'd tell her, 'I don't know if I like it like that,' " Chinn
said.

"And she'd say, 'Well, that's what you're going to
get.'

"She always wanted to do hair. She did my hair when
I was Miss FHA."

A few years ago, Small explored another career, at
the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

"She wanted to become a lab tech, I believe," Chinn
said. "She started about two or 2 1/2 years ago, but
she didn't stay there long.

"She got sick.

"She had to leave and come home. That's when she
had to start her dialysis."

Small had battled diabetes all her life, but over time
her symptoms worsened.

One day as they were picking up their sons at
school, Small told Wilson how bad things had
become.

"She told me that her last kidney had gone out,"
Wilson said.

"I remember saying, 'What does that mean?'

"She told me, 'If I don't get a transplant, I'm going to
die.' "

Small waited for a donor for a while.

In the meantime, she underwent dialysis - the
clinical purification of the blood, a substitute for the
kidneys.

For someone on dialysis, the average life
expectancy is about eight years, physicians say.

After every visit to the dialysis center, Small felt
drained for hours, said Gordon, her cousin.

"And it was just her and her child in her house," he
said.

"I'd go by sometimes and cut the grass, do stuff that
she wasn't able to do.

"Every time, if I saw candy in her house, I'd eat it
right then or put it in my pocket.

"Stuff she didn't need. She liked those miniature
M&Ms.

"Even then, she lost a lot of weight on dialysis.

"Last summer, she had to stop doing hair. She said,
'If only I could get a kidney.'

"Finally, she did. She came home so happy-go-
lucky.

"Then it was like a crash. She crashed straight
down."

On Feb. 8, the Greater Middleton Grove African
Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Canton held a
funeral, along with a high school reunion of sorts.

About 30 or 40 of Ellecia Small's high school
classmates showed up.

"The life of the party is gone," Chinn said.

"But in a way, it strengthened us.

"We never had a class reunion before. Even in death,
she had a way of bringing people together."

But even Chinn, one of Small's best friends, had not
seen her in a while.

"I thought she was going to get better," Chinn said.
"We just ran out of time, I guess.

"Even now, though she's dead and buried, it seems
like I ought to be able to talk to her."

She was buried on a Monday.

"When I looked in the casket, that wasn't the person I
knew," Chinn said.

"I said, 'Y'all have the wrong person in here.' "