Transplant gives young mum Anita the gift of life

It’s a normal Wednesday afternoon in Anita Ainsworth’s home in Tuam. Her six-year-old daughter, Ayla runs in and out of the kitchen, looking for food and chatting, while her younger daughter, four-month-old Evey is on her bouncing chair, being doted upon by cousins.

This normality was hard-won, because six years ago, Anita was diagnosed with a rare and life-threatening disease and told she had just six months to live – unless she got a double lung transplant.

Anita, who is now 33, was told she had lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a disease, which mostly affects women of childbearing age and which cause their lungs to deteriorate.

Looking back, she realises that she probably had the condition for a long time; it just hadn’t been diagnosed.

From Tuam, she trained as a chef at GMIT and, after college went travelling, first to Australia for a year and then to America.

“When I was in Australia I had a collapsed lung and was diagnosed with asthma. Then I went to the States. I had shortness of breath but thought it was because I smoked a bit at the time and because of the asthma,” she says.

So she wasn’t overly concerned. While working as a chef in New York she started dating a young Limerick man, Aidan Whelan and became pregnant.

Ayla was born in New York, after which Anita’s breathing became particularly bad, but again, she put it down to asthma.

“In June 2006, I came home for a family wedding and found it hard to breathe. The day after, I ended up in hospital in Castlebar having tests and they told me I had LAM.

Anita was “put on oxygen 24-7 and told I needed a double lung transplant and that I needed it within six months”.

At that stage Ayla was just four months old and the young mother was “devastated”.

After the initial diagnosis, Anita was put under the care of the Mater Hospital in Dublin and spent her time travelling between there, Tuam and Limerick, where Aidan is from. She had fantastic family support, she says.

“I was in shock and was worrying about the little one, but it never entered my head I wouldn’t get the lungs,” she says.

But from October 2006 to January 2007 Anita was confined to hospital, on force blown oxygen. That is 99 per cent oxygen, blown into your face and it was needed because regular oxygen wasn’t working any more.

Ayla’s first Christmas was spent in the hospital room with her parents, because Anita was so ill.

Anita is not religious “in the sense of going to Mass, but you have to have faith in something”, she feels and that sustained her through her illness.

However, despite being convinced she would get the transplant she needed in order to survive, Anita had written farewell letters to her daughter, Aidan and other family members in case the worst happened.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.