She Almost Died as an Infant-Now She Saves Lives the Same Way Hers Was Saved

As a liver transplant nurse at Cleveland Clinic, Hannah Fleming, who is 28 and lives in Ohio, knows that she doesn't have a typical job. "When you are part of a transplant team, going to work is not just ‘another day at work.' This is not just a job to me. I know what we are doing will change a person's whole life. It's going to change them forever," she tells Parade.

Fleming knows that for her patients, the day they get a transplant is likely the biggest day of their lives. "My favorite part of my job is talking to patients and getting to know them a little bit before they go to sleep [before the operation]. Everybody has a story," she says.

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Her liver transplant patients are people of all ages, ranging from kids to senior adults. In addition to facilitating liver transplants, Fleming and her team also perform liver resections in people with liver cancer. "We do more than transplants, but transplants are the most common operation we do," she explains.

Fleming's life-saving work already makes her job special. But what makes her really unique is that Fleming has had a liver transplant herself.

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A Life-Changing Call That Came Just in Time

When Fleming was born in 1998, she was very jaundiced and quickly diagnosed with biliary atresia, a rare, life-threatening pediatric liver disease. "Biliary atresia is a disease of the bile ducts in the liver where the bile ducts don't work properly," she tells Parade.

In an effort to treat it, she underwent a surgical treatment called a Kasai procedure. During this surgery, the blocked bile ducts are removed and a new path for bile duct drainage is created using a portion of the small intestine. Unfortunately, the treatment only lasted a couple of weeks. "Not all Kasai procedures work, and mine didn't," Fleming says. Because of this, she was put on the liver transplant list at just a few weeks old.

Fleming explains that in 1998, transplant surgeries were considered extremely risky and her family's health insurance would not cover it. On top of already worrying about whether their baby would live, her parents had to figure out a way to pay for the procedure. Several months after her Kasai procedure, when Fleming was five months old, her family was at a spaghetti dinner fundraiser, raising money for her transplant surgery. While they were there, Fleming became very sick and had to be taken to the hospital.

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The hospital that her family lived near couldn't treat her there, so Fleming and her mom were air-lifted and flown by helicopter to Akron Children's Hospital, which was more equipped to treat her. Fleming's father took the three-plus-hour drive to the hospital to meet them there. Once at the hospital, Fleming was placed in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Her mother became friendly with another mom whose infant son was in the NICU waiting for an intestinal transplant. Over the next several months, the two moms became a support system of two, knowing that very few other parents would ever understand what they were going through.

Fleming was in the NICU for almost four months when the doctors gave her parents devastating news: Fleming wasn't improving and it didn't seem like a liver was going to become available in time to save her. They suggested the family go home and make baby Fleming as comfortable as she could be in her final days.

Grief-stricken and exhausted, Fleming's mom asked the doctor if they could stay just one more night and drive home in the morning. The doctor agreed. Fleming's mom stayed with her in the NICU and her dad went to the hospital hotel to try to get some sleep. But later that night, something miraculous happened: A call came into the nurse's station saying that a liver had just become available. It was time to prep Fleming for surgery.

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What a Liver Transplant Nurse Wants Everyone To Know About Organ Donation

When Fleming's mom got the news about the available liver, her husband was at the hospital hotel. This was the late ‘90s and they did not have cell phones. Knowing exactly what this news meant to their family, the mom that Fleming's mom befriended in the NICU took the hospital shuttle to the hotel to give Fleming's dad the good news.

Fleming's transplant surgery went perfectly. With a new liver, she didn't even have biliary atresia anymore. After the surgery, Fleming's mom went to the NICU to thank her friend for finding her husband. When she couldn't find her, she asked a nurse if she knew where she was. The nurse shared that her friend's son had unfortunately died, so they were no longer there.

This is one reason why Fleming is so passionate about organ donation today. "Because of my donor, I got to be a kid. I got to grow up and graduate college. I got to become a nurse. But he didn't because he didn't have a donor. Organ donation can change someone's life," she says.

Life After Her Liver Transplant

After her liver transplant, Fleming says she had a normal childhood and was as healthy as any other kid. Her parents were always very open about her health journey. She says that every year, the hospital where she had her transplant has a picnic for transplant recipients, donors and families, so she grew up going to that picnic and knowing why she was there. But Fleming says it wasn't until she was in middle school or high school that she truly understood the gravity of what it meant.

Learning her personal health journey made her even more interested in science and math, subjects she was already naturally interested in. Fleming says that one of her family members worked in the operating room and when she was in high school, she was able to shadow her for a day. After that, Fleming knew she wanted to work in an operating room herself one day. Now, she's on the liver transplant team at Cleveland Clinic.

"As soon as I was in the operating room and saw a transplant, I knew this was where I was meant to be," Fleming says.

There's certainly no doubt that that's true.

Learn more about organ donation at Donate Life America.

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Sources:

• Biliary Atresia. Cleveland Clinic
• Kasai Procedure. Cleveland Clinic

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This story was originally published June 3, 2026 at 4:30 PM.