Angels

The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight.

~President Jed Bartlett, The West Wing

It's rare that I do this, but Tiffany's last blog entry, inspired me to write something, so here I go! Tiffany wrote about a friend of hers who has cystic fibrosis, he is 20 and can't get a lung transplant because he has a high-risk infection which makes the operation too risky. It is strange that a person with a fatal illness would be told that anything is too risky, a point which he makes as well.

Two years ago, the summer before I started law school, my friend Katie Ozog died from cystic fibrosis. She was 22. Katie already had a lung transplant, almost a year earlier, but her body rejected her new lungs while she slept, and Katie never woke up. It was heartbreaking for everyone who knew her, especially because the transplant was supposed to save her. I couldn't believe her body could reject the transplant so long after the operation. The worst part about cystic fibrosis is that the disease attacks the new lungs as well. So nobody expected her to live past 28 with the new lungs, but we expected she would at least make it to 25.

So, when I read about Tiffany's friend I googled Katie's name. I was SURE I would find tons about her because she was so well known in Western New York, and among the CF community. But alas, I found next to nothing. One was a blog of someone who knew Katie in high school & had a memorial to her, then there were expired pages advertising a concert & a rummage sale held in her honor in 2003, then, worst of all, is a page by the WNY CF Foundation advertising a walk in 2002, and Katie's name is on there because she worked for the foundation and helped plan the walk. This was from before she died.

Apparently, all the articles about her are now archived and so they don't pop-up on google, and so, Katie is lost. That is even more heartbreaking. So, I will tell you about her, as much as I can, because she was an amazing person....not amazing for a person with CF, amazing for a human being.

I only met Katie in high school, so I dont know much about her before the age of 14, except that her mother's brother also died of CF, at a much younger age, and that Katie had a brother who was CF free. In high school she was a cheerleader (and an amazing one) and an officer in Student Council, I think all 4 years. She was a tiny girl, and just so sweet and kind. She was popular but not full of herself. I never knew she was sick. Then, about 2 years after high school I saw her again. She came into the salon where I was working, wearing this strange looking bag that had tubes coming out of it & going to her nose. I said "Katie! What's wrong?" "It's my cystic fibrosis." she said. I was stunned "Your what?????" And that's when she told me.

A few months later Katie had a pager. That was so the Drs could page her when they found a lung for her (I actually don't know if she got 1 lung or 2 lungs in the transplant...I'm not sure if it's like kidneys or something). Anyway, her pager number happened to be one number off from some crack dealer in downtown buffalo so she got like 300 false alarms in the 1st week! When the Dr finally paged her, she almost ignored it!

But, they took her to Pittsburgh on a plane and she got the transplant. She did really well. They wrote a huge feature in the newspaper about her, and put her beautiful picture in it. It was great. About a year later, she went to a planning meeting at WNY CF about a CF race in Disney World. Katie was planning on participating, as much as she could. That night, she went to bed and never woke up. Nobody had a clue it was her last day. Her passing was a feature story on the local news in Buffalo, and I went to her wake the first night.

My sister and I took her roses. Katie used to tell the story about the little boy who said "sixty-five roses" rather than "cystic fibrosis" so, since bringing 65 roses to a wake is a bit absurd, we settled for 2. We left them in her casket. It was awful. I had never seen her silent before. She was always chatting, or giggling, or making a presentation, or raising money, she was never silent, never still. They buried her in her college cheerleading jogging suit. There were tons of pictures everywhere of her and all her friends. Her mother and best friends were beyond shaken. And there was a line of people out the door. A line of people just beginning their adult lives. Just graduating from college. Some getting married, some starting careers, some going to grad school. And there was Katie. Those high school years that we were all trying to escape, were literally the prime years of her life.

So, that is Katie Ozog. The world is a better place because of her, and now the web is a better place too.