USD Magazine, Spring 2003

ALMANAC

Given Second Chance, Alumna Leads Action– Packed Life by Michael R. Haskins I n November 2001, Christine Galan crossed the finish line of the New York City Marathon. But the journey she completed was so much longer than 26 miles. Galan, a 1984 arcs and sciences graduate, was the first person with a heart and liver transplant to complete the famed race. Even more miraculously, she did so just three years after her transplant surgery. You'd expect char she made a few pit stops along the co urse, and you'd be right. Bur nor to rest - she paused only to tape segments for a docu– mentary film on tissue donation. HEART IN It's not unusual for Galan to multi-task, even during a grueling endurance test that takes the wind out of the most fir athletes' sails. Having faced imminent death - an organ donor came through with only hours to spare - she chooses nor to waste a minute of her life.

"I don't feel bad about what's happened to me, I feel privileged," says Galan, 40. "I have nothing to complain about. I have life." Still, if Galan wanted to complain, nobody would begrudge her. As a high school senior in 1980, she began suffering from severe anemia, had to have her spleen and gallbladder removed, and went on a medicinal regime that wreaked havoc with her body. Seven years later, she was diag– nosed with a rare form of lupus that caused congestive heart failure, requiring more med– icine and chemotherapy. A decade after that, she developed liver stones char led to the chronic liver fai lure and weakened heart for which she required the double transplant. But chat's only half the story. During those same years, Galan finished high school and college, moved to New York City, opened a branch of her fan1ily's promotional advertising company, and became one of the most active tri-state volunteers for the Starlight Foundation, an organization that grants the wishes of chronically and termi– nally ill children. In 1997, as her own health

failed and she made plans to move back tO her parents' home in San Diego while await– ing an organ donor, she granted 23 Starlight Foundation wishes - more than any volun– teer that year. Since her transplant surgery, Galan, against all conventional wisdom, has expo– nentially increased her activities. Her recov– ery stunned the medical community, espe– cially when she lefr the hospital after 18 days, immediately went back to work and began exercising on a treadmill. "The doctors told me I would, at best, only be able to walk slowly for the rest of my life," says Galan, who still sports the Jan1aican accent she acquired as a child on her native island, from which her parents moved co California when she was 14. "Every time I did something, they said that I shouldn't be able to do it. " Those same physicians, who never have been able to trace the cause of her many rare ailments, would be hard-pressed to keep up with her today. Bur lee's nor sugar coat it. Galan was on dialysis and in so much pain

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USO MAGAZINE