On a Friday night, Torrie Kruse’s world went black.
The teenager can’t recall being rushed to the hospital. She can’t recall doctors scrambling around her hospital bed, trying to make sense of the problem. She can’t recall her family sitting at her bedside for hours on end, or players from her softball team coming to visit. She can’t recall the morphine, or the jaundice that covered her entire body.
“I was so out of it, I hardly remember anything,” she tells the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Torrie was a star on her school softball team. Her friends had called her “the life of the party.” But now, submerged under white hospital sheets made whiter against her pallid yellow skin, Torrie’s life force slowly slipped away.
Doctors were convinced something had to be wrong with her liver; a liver transplant was immediately ordered. While the family anxiously awaited a donor, Torri was moved to St. Louis Children’s Hospital. There, she was diagnosed with Wilson’s disease, which causes too much copper to accumulate in various organs, but especially in the liver.
In patients diagnosed with Wilson’s disease (aka Wilson disease), symptoms on average begin between the ages of 12 and 23.
Lucky for Torrie, they caught it relatively early, meaning her disease could be treated. Since being on medication, Torrie has slowly returned to her old self. In fact, she’s back to playing softball! Atta girl!
Torrie reminisces fondly on her hospital stint, because the nurses ”kept my spirits up,” she says. So, instead of going to college to play softball as she had always planned, she now wants to become a pediatric nurse.
Provided that Torrie stays consistent with her medication and keeps taking good care of herself, the sky is truly the limit for her and all those who once came so close to losing hope because of a chronic disease!
