(NEW YORK) — A Tennessee-based woman is easing back to school stress and boosting confidence by generously offering her hair braiding services for free.
Brittany Starks posted on Facebook: “Anyone know single parents who can’t afford to get their child’s hair done for school? I will braid it for free!”
Since posting, her inital ask has taken off like wildfire.
The single mother of two said she’s been homeless twice and in an unfortunate predicament where all of her children’s clothing was in storage and she faced the issue of trying to figure out how to make ends meet to get them what they needed before heading back to school.
Then, a family friend gave her children bookbags and clothes. “It was perfect,” she told “Good Morning America.” “So after that, I was thinking how can I give back?”
Once Starks realized how she could help other single mothers who may have been in similar situations to her own through offering free hair braiding, she thought only about seven people would reach out.
However, she’s now braided over 35 children’s hair.
Starks opened up about hearing some of the stories of the mothers of the children brought to her and mentioned how some had recently gone through a divorce and others were going through depression.
“I remember when I was depressed I wanted to die, and I know these moms probably don’t feel like doing anything as they are going through it trying to figure out ways to make themselves happy,” Starks said.
She continued: “There were also two little girls who didn’t go to school the first few days because they weren’t able to get their hair done.”
Starks also explained how some of the young girls would come in with a really quiet demeanor along with their heads down, but leave smiling and showing so much more of their personality after getting their hair styled.
Since offering her services at the beginning of August, Starks shared an updated social media post asking for help from other local braiders, due to the large number of children that have been reaching out to her.
She was able to book space at a church and other braiders such as Donna Garcia also offered their services. Together, they created a hair braiding event that Starks now looks forward to hosting monthly.
“The biggest response came after it went viral. I had other parents in other states reaching out to ask if I could braid their children’s hair,” said Starks.
While Starks said most of the hairstyles can be time-consuming, ranging from four to six hours and priced between $120 – $250 and up, seeing each parent and child smile makes every moment worth it.
“I didn’t expect all of this at all. I’ve been surprised and overwhelmed at the same time,” said Starks. “I just feel like it was such a big blessing and I feel like I’ve found my purpose in life.”
(Courtesy Ross and Angeline Eschette) Ross and Angeline Eschette pose with their newborn daughter at Nacogdoches Medical Center, in Nacogdoches, Texas.
(LOCKPORT, La.) — Ross and Angeline Eschette and their 7-year-old son evacuated their home state of Louisiana for Texas this weekend as Hurricane Ida prepared to hit.
The Eschettes will return to their home in Lockport later this week as a family of four after Angel Eschette gave birth while evacuated.
“She wanted to be part of the hurricane party,” Ross Eschette said of the couple’s newborn daughter, Adeline Grace, born on Aug. 30, just after Ida battered Louisiana as a fierce Category 4 storm.
Angeline Eschette’s original due date was Sept. 17, but her water broke overnight on Aug. 30 as they stayed with extended family members at a hotel in Nacogdoches, Texas.
The Eschettes, both natives of Lockport, a small town of about 3,000 people one hour outside of New Orleans, said they had weathered hurricanes before, but did not want to take any chances with Ida while expecting their second child.
“My No. 1 concern was to get as far away from the storm as possible, just to keep her from having the baby,” said Ross Eschette, 36. “In planning the evacuation, it wasn’t just let’s find a [hotel] room and go there, it was let’s find a hospital and then find a room nearby.”
The Eschettes said they not only had to evacuate their home and find a hospital away from home that they could be near, but also did so while Angeline Eschette, 33, dealt with a higher risk pregnancy due to gestational diabetes and was quarantining after testing positive for COVID-19.
“I was waiting to get vaccinated until after I gave birth. Even though they said there’s no harm, I still had my concerns about it,” she said. “But I was very lucky to not have a severe case.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month strengthened its recommendation for COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, stating that all women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or trying to get pregnant now or might become pregnant in the future should get a COVID-19 vaccine.
The Eschettes and their family members drove an RV six hours from their home in Lockport to Nacogdoches, where Angeline Eschette gave birth at Nacogdoches Medical Center.
Ross Eschette, who did not contract COVID-19, was able to stay with his wife and daughter in the hospital room, but was not allowed to leave due to COVID restrictions.
Adeline Grace was born healthy, weighing in at 8 pounds and one ounce, according to her parents.
Both of Adeline’s great-great-grandmothers are, by chance, named Ida, according to Angeline, who said she did not consider the name for her daughter.
“When Hurricane Katrina hit our area, everybody named their babies Katrina after that, so my nephew thought it would be funny to name her Ida and then said he was going to call her Ida Lynn,” said Angeline. “I said, ‘No, that’s not going on the birth certificate.'”
Both Angeline and Ross Eschette said they have had to balance their joy at the birth of their daughter with the heartache of the devastation caused by Hurricane Ida, particularly in Lockport.
The family said the hospitals in the area, including where Angeline planned to give birth, all had to evacuate their patients during the storm for various reasons.
“In the situation that we were in, we definitely made the right choice,” said Ross Eschette. “And we’ve been treated with the utmost respect [at Nacogdoches Medical Center]. They definitely made our experience everything we needed it to be.”
“I feel lucky to be safe in a place that was out of harm’s way and that I had a safe place to deliver,” added Angeline Eschette.
The couple said they have heard from neighbors that their home’s roof was severely damaged but their house is still standing. They expect electricity in their town to be out for the next three to four weeks.
As of Wednesday, over 884,000 customers remained without power in Louisiana, according to a report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) obtained by ABC News.
“It’s hard for us to stay here for a while financially so we will try to make our way back home towards the end of the week,” said Angeline Eschette, who was discharged from the hospital on Wednesday. “We have a camper and they have a few campgrounds where we’re going to try to set up because we can’t go back home right now. Our town is just a disaster.”
Ross Eschette said he has been in touch with friends who stayed behind in Lockport to see what supplies are needed so that they can try to get them in Texas before they drive home.
“People are watching the news and seeing the devastation of what our hometown and the surrounding area are going through, but the number one thing about us is we are the most resilient people in the world,” he said. “We all come together and we’re going to rebuild better than ever. It’s definitely not going to stop us.”
Texas State Capitol in Austin, TX (Credit: dszc/iStock)
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court issuing an unsigned order refusing to block a Texas abortion ban while it faces a legal challenge stunned many and marked a significant moment in the United States’ history of reproductive rights.
The playbook for years by anti-abortion legislators was to slowly chip away at the right to an abortion via mechanisms like “targeted restrictions on abortion providers” or “TRAP” laws, while outright pre-viability bans were seen as unrealistic.
“This was really bad and really unexpected,” Robin Marty, operations director at the West Alabama Women’s Center and author of “New Handbook for a Post-Roe America,” told ABC News. “We thought it would be slower and not nearly as, ‘all right, we’re done, rights are gone.'”
The Texas law bans physicians from providing abortions “if the physician detects a fetal heartbeat,” including embryonic cardiac activity, which can be as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Before Wednesday, no law was in effect that banned abortions earlier than 20 weeks of pregnancy. Many states had tried to enact early gestational bans, but they had all been blocked by courts.
That’s because of clear precedent. In 1973, the Supreme Court declared abortion a protected right in Roe v. Wade. Twenty years later, in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court reaffirmed “the constitutionally protected liberty of the woman to decide to have an abortion before the fetus attains viability and to obtain it without undo interference from the State.”
“Viability” means a fetus can survive outside of a uterus, and that typically happens around 24 to 28 weeks. So laws that outright ban abortion before that stage have been systematically knocked down by courts.
“Every time the states have passed them, the federal courts universally blocked them,” Marc Hearron, lead attorney on the Texas case and senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told ABC News. “This is the first time that a federal court has allowed a six-week ban to take effect.”
A six-week ban in Georgia, for instance, was struck down last year.
“A ‘heartbeat’ ban isn’t even close to viability. So there’s nothing about that that was even an attempt to be within the confines of the Constitution. That standing alone would make it unconstitutional,” Kimberly Mutcherson, co-dean and law professor at Rutgers Law School, told ABC News about the Texas law.
Before the Georgia law was struck down, it was blocked from going into effect while courts heard the challenge. That is how these cases usually go and was what the Center for Reproductive Rights was asking for from the Supreme Court.
“The thing that the federal court should do when a law is going to pose grave harm is preserve the status quo while if there are difficult issues, you can litigate those difficult issues,” Hearron said.
This was something Chief Justice John Roberts called for in his own dissent, writing: “I would grant preliminary relief to preserve the status quo ante — before the law went into effect — so that the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.”
The Texas law is different from previous bans in that it prohibits the state from enforcing the ban, instead authorizing private citizens to bring civil suits against anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion.
With that, Mutcherson said, “they created this sort of confusion and this hook that the Supreme Court was able to use in order to say, ‘We’re not going to stay the law, we’re going to allow it to go into effect, and then we’ll see what happens.'”
Marty believes one thing that will happen is “people are going to have to decide for themselves whether this is a just law that needs to be followed or not, and what sort of risks they’re willing to take in order to essentially bring it down.”
What’s also different now is the makeup of the Supreme Court since President Donald Trump’s appointments and the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To Mutcherson, this was a sign of “raw politics coming out of the Supreme Court,” and many saw this as the result of years of increasingly bold state laws being proposed by lawmakers emboldened by the new conservative majority and a slate of federal appellate judges appointed by Trump.
It is important to note that the Supreme Court’s order stated it “is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’ law.” Rather, the order not to issue an injunction was on technical grounds, and the legal challenge against the law is ongoing.
“The law remains that these bans are unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court let one take effect anyway,” Hearron said.
This order also in no way overturned Roe.
“Where we stand right now is that Texas has a law on the books that is completely unconstitutional under the precedent of Roe and Casey, but that law has not yet been enjoined or officially declared unconstitutional by any court,” Mutcherson said, adding, “The right to abortion continues to exist and continues to be protected by Roe and by Casey.”
And in the meantime, Mutcherson said, “The women who are going to suffer are women of color, poor women, young women, women who are undocumented — those are the folks that these kinds of laws really strike at.”
(NEW ORLEANS) — President Joe Biden planned to travel to New Orleans Friday to survey damage caused by Hurricane Ida, meeting with local leaders and demonstrating the federal response to the storm that made landfall in Louisiana before devastating much of the Northeast United States.
Biden was scheduled to head to hard-hit LaPlace, La., just outside New Orleans, to receive a briefing from local leaders, tour a neighborhood and make remarks.
He planned to then take an aerial tour of particularly battered communities in the area, including Lafitte, Grand Isle, Port Fourchon and Lafourche Parish, according to the White House.
Later, he was scheduled to travel to meet with local leaders in Galliano, La., south of New Orleans.
The White House has sought to project a strong federal response to the storm as the president suffers from public disapproval of his handling of another recent crisis, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
During remarks Thursday, Biden told those in the Gulf region that “we’re all in this together.”
“The nation is here to help,” he said.
Ida and its remnants have left more than at least 61 people dead in eight states, including at least 48 in the Northeast.
(NEW ORLEANS) — President Joe Biden traveled to New Orleans Friday to survey damage caused by Hurricane Ida, meet with local leaders and demonstrate the federal response to the storm that made landfall in Louisiana before devastating much of the Northeast United States.
“We came because we want to hear directly from you all, what specific problems you’ve been dealing with,” Biden told local officials in hard-hit LaPlace, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans
In LaPlace, local officials spoke with the president about the destruction in the region and the long-term impact the storm would have in the area.
Biden told the officials — including Gov. John Bel Edwards, the CEOs of local hospitals and the energy company Entergy, members of Congress and local parish presidents — that he thought it was important to rebuild damaged infrastructure in a more resilient manner, whether it meant placing power lines underground or making roofs stronger.
“This storm has been incredible, not only here but all the way up the East Coast,” Biden said.
Air Force One touched down in New Orleans early Friday afternoon, where the president was greeted by federal, state and local officials from Louisiana: Edwards, U.S. Sens. Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy, U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and Jefferson Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng.
Biden then took a helicopter over storm-damaged homes to LaPlace, where in addition to the briefing from local leaders, he planned to tour a neighborhood and make remarks.
He was then scheduled to take an aerial tour of particularly battered communities in the area, including Lafitte, Grand Isle, Port Fourchon and Lafourche Parish, according to the White House.
Later, he was scheduled to travel to meet with local leaders in Galliano, La., south of New Orleans.
The White House has sought to project a strong federal response to the storm as the president suffers from public disapproval of his handling of another recent crisis, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
During remarks Thursday, Biden told those in the Gulf region that “we’re all in this together.”
“The nation is here to help,” he said.
Ida and its remnants have left more than at least 61 people dead in eight states, including at least 48 in the Northeast.
(NEW YORK) — When Kat, a 23-year-old living in Central Texas, discovered they were pregnant, it was five days before a law that bans nearly all abortions after six weeks was to go into effect.
“I was stuck with this reality that I was pregnant days before one of the worst abortion bans that I’ve seen in my life gets implemented in Texas,” Kat, whose gender pronouns are they/them and who asked that their last name not be used, told Good Morning America. I was scared.”
Kat said that after estimating they were likely between four and six weeks pregnant, they feared not having access to an abortion after Sept. 1, the day the law, Senate Bill 8, went into effect. They also learned the two abortion providers in town were “completely booked” due to the pending deadline.
“I thought I can’t be pregnant right now. I don’t want to be pregnant. I don’t have the time or money to travel out of state [for an abortion],” said Kat. “I knew I had to do what was best for me and my best option was to have an abortion at home.”
Kat said they went through with a self-managed abortion at home and while medically safe, the experience felt terrifying.
A self-managed abortion is one that occurs outside of a clinical setting. It is typically done by taking medication that induces a miscarriage.
“The reality is that I was at home alone having an abortion,” they said. “I was worried about going to the hospital, worried about complications and didn’t have anyone there with me because of COVID.”
Kat’s experience is one that abortion rights advocates worry will become all too common across Texas, the nation’s second most populous state with now the most restrictive abortion law in the nation.
The law, enforced after the U.S. Supreme Court failed to intervene, does not make exceptions for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape. It allows anyone to sue a person they believe is providing an abortion or assisting someone in getting an abortion after six weeks.
When a person is six weeks pregnant, it typically means the embryo started developing about four weeks prior, based on the formula used to figure out when a person will give birth. People don’t often realize they are pregnant until after the six-week mark.
Cardiac activity is typically first detected five to six weeks into pregnancy, or three-four weeks after the embryo starts developing.
“A lot of people don’t think about abortion access until they need an abortion,” said Joan Lamunyon Sanford, executive director of the New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which provides financial and logistical support for people who travel to New Mexico for abortions. “There are likely people in Texas that don’t know they’re pregnant yet today but will find out they’re pregnant next week or the week after and will call their local clinic and find out that they can’t be seen.”
Lamunyon Sanford’s organization and others that help cover the costs of travel for people to seek abortions say they are already seeing an increase in services needed, and bracing for more.
“We anticipate it’s going to really start increasing next week or the week after, but we’re ready,” said Lamunyon Sanford. “Instead of the shame or stigma that people may have faced in Texas, we’ll make sure that they are able to follow through and get the health care that they need.”
There are currently less than two dozen abortion clinics in Texas, home to more than 6 million people of childbearing age, as of 2019. As the clinics in Texas have stopped scheduling abortion-related visits for people more than six weeks pregnant, the lengths people have to go in order to access abortions has multiplied exponentially.
The new law has increased the average miles a Texan must drive one-way to seek an abortion from 12 miles to 248, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights organization.
A trip from Texas to Wichita, Kansas, for someone seeking an abortion is, on average, 650 miles roundtrip. People have been making that trip with increasing frequency already this week, according to Ashley Brink, clinic director of Wichita’s Trust Women clinic.
“Yesterday I felt like our phones were constant. Multiple phone lines lit up and ringing,” said Brink. “We have already seen an increase.”
Brink said she has been preparing for the influx for weeks, making sure the clinic has enough supplies and trying to get more physicians in the clinic, a difficult task in Kansas, where she says over 90% of counties don’t have an abortion provider.
In Oklahoma City — more than 460 miles from South Texas — the Trust Women clinic there typically receives calls from three to five people from Texas per day. On Tuesday and Wednesday, as the law went into effect, the clinic scheduled 80 appointments, and of those, as many as 55 were patients from Texas.
“That’s just going to increase as people from farther away start to look to see where they can get access,” said Zack Gingrich-Gaylord, communications manager for Trust Women Clinics. “Throughout the Gulf [Coast] and the I-35 corridor, the center of the country and the Southwest, that’s all going to radiate and start to have a lot of strain put on those clinics and people are going to have to travel farther and farther.”
“If you had to travel overnight to go see a dentist, you would think that’s ludicrous,” he said. “But it’s expected of people seeking abortion care, that they are going to have to significantly disrupt their own lives.”
Adding to the difficulty of seeking abortion care outside of their home state is the fact that abortion is difficult emotionally and physically, and time sensitive, according to Dr. Iman Alsaden, an OBGYN in Missouri and Kansas and medical director for Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which provides care in Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri.
“It’s absolutely devastating that people are being forced to leave their communities to seek safe, essential health care outside of the state,” said Alsaden, also a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health. “It’s heartbreaking to think of all of the people who may not be able to make it to a desired appointment to receive abortion care.”
Alsaden said her clinics have seen an “influx of patients” from Texas over the last few weeks, noting, “We have adjusted our schedules to ensure that we can take care of as many patients as possible, no matter where they’re coming to us from.”
Lori Williams, a nurse practitioner and the clinic director at Little Rock Family Planning Services in Little Rock, Arkansas, described the patients her clinic is seeing from Texas as “frantic.”
“Many didn’t realize that this was coming or didn’t know that they were suddenly not going to be able to obtain care,” said Williams, also chair of the National Abortion Federation Board, a membership association of abortion providers. “I had patients today driving seven hours to see us and Arkansas has a [72-hour] waiting period so that means these patients will have to travel twice.”
Williams said she worries that as many patients from Texas as the clinic expects to see over the coming weeks and months, she knows there will be just as many, or more, who cannot access care.
“We know there are patients that tell us, ‘I don’t have a car that can make it that far,’ ‘I can’t get off work that many times,’ and these are the challenges we’re trying to have our patients navigate,” she said. “It’s the time off work, the child care, the expense, all the things that go along with this, which makes this an economic crisis for women, in addition to an access to care crisis.”
The rates of unintended pregnancy in the U.S. are highest among low-income women, women aged 18 to 24 and women of color, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Meanwhile, people denied an abortion are more likely to experience long-term economic hardship and insecurity than people who received an abortion, according to a 2018 study published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH).
“The women who have the means will obtain the care, but the women who were already struggling financially, who are socioeconomically disadvantaged are the ones who are going to be impacted the most,” said Williams. “There are going to be women out there who are forced to carry a pregnancy than they don’t want to.”
“This is really going to have an impact more so than the abortion providers are going to see,” she said.
Maleeha Aziz, a community organizer with the Texas Equal Access Fund, one of Texas’ nearly one dozen abortion funds that provide support to women seeking abortions, said it cost her about $1,500 to travel from Texas to Colorado for an abortion eight years ago.
Her organization and other abortion funds in the state are now working to raise additional funds and figure out the logistics needed for people in Texas to travel farther distances for care.
“While it’s a lot harder, we’re going to do whatever we can legally, even if that means flying someone out of state,” said Aziz. “We are going to need so much more money because the cost [is high].”
Adding to the financial and logistical challenges is the fact that Texas is surrounded by states that have also have laws limiting abortion access. Those laws, called targeted restrictions on abortion providers, or TRAP laws, by abortion rights advocates, have been implemented in mainly conservative states to avoid being overturned in court and still limit abortion access in a variety of ways.
In the four states with which Texas shares a border, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico, there were just 21 facilities providing abortions combined as of 2017, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Robin Marty, operations director at the West Alabama Women’s Center, said the clinic is bracing for a trickle-down effect of patients from Texas making their way to Alabama because of a lack of access in other states.
“I believe that for people who are pregnant in Texas, I believe that a lot of them, if they were in early pregnancy, probably thought that they could just hold on for a while and see how everything’s sorted out,” she said. “So I expect next week to be the point at which things are really going to become clear what this does to the landscape, because people are going to start first calling Louisiana, where they’re probably going to find out that there is a very long wait, because there already is, and then they’re going to try to go next to Mississippi and will find mostly the same thing. And by that point, we’re talking, when you come to Alabama, that’s an eight-and-a-half hour drive.”
Adrienne Mansanares, chief experience officer for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, which provides health care in Colorado, New Mexico, and Las Vegas, said that while their clinics are already seeing the immediate impact of Texas’s law, they are also planning for the long road ahead.
“That last bit of hope that there would be a solution, that there would be a backstop, that there would be protections for this procedure, that being gone has really shook a lot of us,” Mansaneres said of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to not block the ban.
“With that, we are absolutely prepared for and doing the really dark, hearty work of trying to figure out what does this look like for years to come, and if it’s not just this law in Texas, what other laws can it be and what other states across the country are going to be this emboldened to continue with these really hostile bans,” she said. “Unfortunately, it’s looking very dark.”
(TOKYO) — Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga will not seek re-election as president of the country’s Liberal Democratic Party, effectively ending his term as prime minister after just one year.
Suga told reporters Friday that he would instead work on policy measures, specifically highlighting efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19. Workin on both the pandemic and a re-election bid, he said, would require so much energy that he felt he must choose one or the other.
“The lives and livelihoods of the people is my first priority,” he explained.
Suga’s announcement came as a surprise despite poor approval ratings for his administration.
He took over in September 2020 after former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe resigned due to health issues. His handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been publicly criticized, including the decision to go ahead with the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, against public sentiment.
(WASHINGTON) — Employers added 235,000 jobs in August, far below expectations of 720,000 new hires, and the unemployment rate dipped slightly to 5.2%, the Department of Labor said Friday.
The fresh labor market data comes as the spread of the more contagious delta variant has throttled the pace of the recovery. The latest figure is a steep fall from the approximately 1 million jobs that were added in both June and July.
So far this year, job growth has averaged 586,000 jobs per month, the DOL said. While employment has risen by some 17 million since April 2020, the economy is still down about 5.3 million jobs from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020 — when the unemployment rate was at a historic low of 3.5% prior to COVID-19 walloping the labor market.
Notable job gains last month occurred in professional and business services (which saw an uptick of 74,000 jobs), transportation and warehousing (which saw a rise of 53,000 jobs), private education (which saw an increase of 40,000 jobs), and manufacturing (which added 37,000 jobs).
Employment in retail trade declined by 29,000 jobs in August, likely a reflection of the virus resurgence, with major losses in food and beverage stores (where 23,000 jobs were lost).
Leisure and hospitality employment was unchanged in August, the DOL said, after back-to-back gains the previous months. Employment in leisure and hospitality is still down by 1.7 million jobs compared to pre-pandemic levels.
The latest data continues to reflect the uneven impact of the COVID-19 downturn. The unemployment rate for white workers was 4.5% in August, compared to 8.8% for Black workers, 6.4% for Hispanic workers and 4.6% for Asian workers.
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) fell in August to 3.2 million, but is 2.1 million higher than in February 2020. These long-term unemployed accounted for 37.4% of the total unemployed in August, according to the DOL.
(CARLOS, Minn.) — A Minnesota father is celebrating a new chance at life thanks to his daughter, who donated part of her liver to save his.
“Now I can take all of Molly’s positive traits because they’re in me,” said Mike Maudal, of Carlos, Minnesota, referring to his daughter, Molly Maudal. “I certainly have a tremendous appreciation for Molly.”
Mike Maudal, 62, was preparing to retire from his job as a loan officer nearly six years ago when he went to his doctor for a routine checkup before his medical benefits ran out.
The doctor noticed something unusual in his blood work and sent him to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, about four hours from the family’s home.
It was at the Mayo Clinic that Mike Maudal was diagnosed with non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), an aggressive form of fatty liver disease, which can progress to cirrhosis and liver failure, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Mike Maudal said he was “very surprised” by the diagnosis, which doctors initially treated with diet changes and medication.
He was even more surprised when two years later, in 2018, doctors told him he would ultimately need a liver transplant.
“I pretty much went into denial. I really didn’t think I was that sick or that I’d need a transplant,” said Mike Maudal. “I thought I was going to beat the odds.”
At home, Molly Maudal, 23, and her mother, Cindy Maudal, watched as their dad and husband, respectively, began to quickly decline both physically and mentally.
“It was really hard. He just got sicker and weaker and was struggling with everyday tasks,” said Cindy Maudal. “And then the fear of what does this mean every time he had some new issue develop … and the [fear of] what if he didn’t make it, what would life be like? What would that be like for me and Molly? And then trying to hold down the house at home, trying to work full-time, take care of his medications, it was stressful.”
Molly Maudal, an only child, said she struggled most with seeing her father’s mental decline, which occurs in people with NASH because the liver is unable to remove toxins from the blood.
“When I was growing up, he was so sharp and to see him lose that to the disease was really hard,” she said. “He was always really jovial and would joke around and people loved him for his humor. It was like his personality changed.”
Mike Maudal was placed on the liver transplant waiting list but doctors, and his family, worried that he would not be strong enough physically to undergo a transplant by the time he was eligible for a liver from a deceased donor.
The Maudals then began to consider a living-donor liver transplant, in which a portion of the liver from a healthy, living person is removed and placed into someone in need of a working liver, according to the Mayo Clinic.
A living donor is able to donate just a part of their liver because the remaining liver regrows to its normal size and capacity within a few months, and the donated portion of the liver also grows and restores normal liver function in the recipient.
“It’s amazing the amount of people who have told us, ‘Oh, I thought I could only donate when I was deceased. I didn’t know I could do this when I was alive,'” said Mike Maudal. “It was news to us too when we started down this path years ago.”
When Cindy Maudal did not qualify as a donor for her husband, the family quietly began to ask loved ones and close friends about the possibility of donating, but fell short of finding a match.
The Maudals all also knew that Molly Maudal, with the same blood type as her dad, could possibly match as a donor, but neither of her parents wanted to put that pressure on her.
“Molly was in college and we wanted her to finish her education,” said Cindy Maudal. “She was young and as a parent, you don’t want to ask for something like that.”
Molly Maudal though said she had been preparing to step up if she was needed, explaining, “In the back of my mind, for several years through it all, I was thinking about being a donor and in several ways wanted to arrange my life so that just in case he needed an emergency transplant, I could be there.”
That moment came in late 2020, when doctors at Mayo Clinic told Mike Maudal that his only chance at surviving liver disease was to find a living donor.
“It hit home in a whole new way hearing that,” said Molly Maudal. “My mom knew I had been thinking about [donating] and she said, ‘Hey Mol, if you’re thinking about this, now is probably a good time to get tested.’ I was totally in agreement.”
Molly Maudal then began the process of being evaluated as a potential donor for her dad, undergoing bloodwork and physical exams and meeting with doctors as well as a psychiatrist and social worker.
She learned she was eligible to save her dad’s life during a phone call with the Mayo Clinic nurse at the end of April.
“It was such a relief to know that we had a match and the wait and the uncertainty of finding a donor was over, just to know that he had a chance now,” she said. “I just had this sense of calm about my decision to move forward. It just felt right.”
Just two months later, on June 11, the Maudal father-daughter duo underwent a living-donor liver transplant at Mayo Clinic.
The approximately four-hour transplant surgery involved a team of three surgeons led by Dr. Julie Heimbach, director of the Mayo Clinic Transplant Center in Rochester.
“I’ve been taking care of Mr. Maudal for several years before transplant and every time I saw him, he was doing worse, so I was very worried about him,” said Heimbach. “He’s an amazing guy and I’m just so happy it worked out.”
“That we can take one side of a healthy person’s liver and give it to somebody else who is really struggling and have them both leave doing great is unbelievable,” she said of living-donor procedure.
The Maudals recovered in hospital rooms near each other and were discharged within one day of each other, Molly on June 17 and Mike on June 18.
“I remember Dr. Heimbach and another surgeon came up and told me, ‘Your liver was perfect for your dad.’ That was a fantastic feeling,” said Molly Maudal. “And I remember visiting dad in his room and we could visibly see him improving. His eyes weren’t as sunken and his color was improving. His sense of humor and personality came back so fast. It was amazing to see firsthand.”
The Maudals, who are both recovering well and returning to their normal daily activities, including work as an occupational therapist for Molly, say they want to share their story to encourage more people to become living liver donors.
The need for living liver donors is great because the demand so far overwhelms the number of livers available from deceased donors.
Of the 8,000 liver transplants performed in the United States in 2017, only about 360 involved living donors. But more than 11,000 people were registered on the waiting list for a liver transplant, according to the Mayo Clinic.
In addition, living-donor liver transplants can help save the lives of children, for whom suitable deceased-donor organs can be hard to find.
In order to be a living liver donor, a person typically needs to just have a matching blood type and meet the health requirements for a transplant, according to Heimbach.
“The liver is more forgiving from an immunology standpoint,” she said. “With a kidney, we are looking at a match pretty closely but with a liver, we’re just looking at having a compatible blood type.”
Cindy Maudal, who watched her two closest family members undergo surgery at the same time, said the family feels likes “one of the lucky ones” in finding a living liver donor.
“I’m not sure Mike would still be here if Molly hadn’t been a match to be a donor for her dad,” she said. “I’m so grateful that the two people I love the most are still with me.”
It was also not lost on the family that June 11, the day their transplant took place, was the same day 24 years ago that Cindy and Mike Maudal found out they were pregnant with their only child.
“That’s the day we found out we were giving Molly life, and it ended up being the same day years later that she gave her dad new life,” said Cindy Maudal.
(AUCKLAND, New Zealand) — New Zealand is reeling from a knife-wielding rampage at a busy Auckland supermarket that left six fighting for their lives and the assailant dead. Authorities have called it a terror attack.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed that the man behind Friday’s terrorist attack in Auckland, who was shot dead by police after he stabbed six people in a supermarket, was inspired by ideologies of the Islamic State militant group.
“A violent extremist undertook a terrorist attack on innocent New Zealanders,” Ardern said at a briefing Friday afternoon.
Three of the six victims were critically injured, one is in serious condition and two are in moderate condition, police said.
The attacker, who cannot be identified under local laws, was a Sri Lankan national who arrived in New Zealand in 2011. He had been a “person of interest” and under heavy surveillance by the New Zealand police and Special Tactics Group since 2016, Ardern said.
The attack took place at LynnMall in the district of New Lynn on Friday afternoon. Officers, who were closely following the man, watched as he entered the Countdown supermarket.
Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said they believe the man took a knife from one of the supermarket shelves. The officers on the scene “challenged the man and diverted his attention.” Police shot and killed him within one minute of beginning the attack.
“We were doing absolutely everything possible to monitor him and indeed the fact that we were able to intervene so quickly, in roughly 60 seconds, shows just how closely we were watching him,” said Coster during Friday’s briefing.
Coster said the attacker was a “lone actor” and authorities are confident there is no further threat posed to the public.
When asked why police resisted arresting or deporting the attacker in recent years, despite “his interest in extremist ideology,” Ardern said authorities did everything they could, within the legal means, “to keep people safe from this individual.”
“What happened today was despicable. It was hateful. It was wrong,” Ardern said.
“It was carried out by an individual—not a faith, not a culture, not an ethnicity, but an individual person—who was gripped by ideology that is not supported here by anyone or any community,” she added. “He alone carries the responsibility for these acts. Let that be where the judgment falls.”
New Zealand has been on high alert for terror attacks since early 2019, when a white supremacist gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch. This May, four people were stabbed in a supermarket in Dunedin on the country’s South Island.
