Friday, January 02, 2004

By Gary Rotstein, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The night of Aug. 14 was a dark one for much of the Northeast. For Cliff Birr, it was a second start on a life rife with mistakes and misfortune the first time around.

	CLOSE-UP 2003 One of a series TOMORROW: Alexander Shabalov of Squirrel Hill, chess player extraordinaire..

Most people in the Pittsburgh region were unaffected by the widest electric blackout in North America's history, but 50 million consumers in northern Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Michigan and Ontario lost power for hours or days.

The phenomenon built hundreds of miles from Birr's Irwin home that Thursday afternoon and evening, interrupting lights, air conditioners, traffic signals, elevators and more. Government investigators ultimately blamed the outage on FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron, Ohio, for allowing trees to interfere with its transmission lines, which set into motion a widening cascade of power failures.

Birr, who was on UPMC's liver transplant waiting list because of hepatitis C and cirrhosis, didn't know anything about the blackout on the night he became one of the few Americans to benefit from it. The unusual circumstances provided him a new liver by the next morning, a break for which he feels fortunate.

"I was in the right place at the right time, I guess," Birr said just before Christmas, awaiting completion of his surgical healing and a return to steady employment and vigorous exercise. "It could have been a sign from a supreme being, I guess -- a sign that there's something He wants me to do while here."

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Cliff Birr -- "I'm going to live the rest of my life healthy as I can." Click photo for larger image.

Birr, 52, had been on the transplant list since April but was facing no immediate threat to his life. The afternoon of the blackout, in fact, he pedaled 30 miles on his mountain bike around Western Pennsylvania's trails, something that would have been unthinkable years earlier as an overweight abuser of drugs and alcohol.

Hepatitis C and cirrhosis had damaged his liver to the extent that it could sustain him for no more than five more years, his doctors estimated. The prognosis was a concern, but hardly one that consumed him as he relaxed at home with his girlfriend and her teenage son the evening of Aug. 14.

The phone rang at 10 p.m., with a UPMC representative inquiring: "We have a liver for you -- how fast can you get here?"

Plenty fast. Within an hour, after a quick shower. The woman who is now his fiancee, Joann Westerberg, drove her Honda nearly 80 mph down the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Parkway East to Oakland.

"I said, 'Honey, I just want to get there in one piece,' " Birr remembers telling Westerberg, a notoriously fast driver even when there's no organ on ice.

The speed with which Westerberg could get Birr to UPMC Presbyterian -- quicker than any other potential transplant recipient of UPMC's whose blood type matched the liver donor's -- meant he moved ahead of individuals sicker than himself on the local transplant list. A good liver only has up to 16 hours to return to usefulness once removed from a body, and that clock was at a later stage than customary because of the blackout.

The organ had been removed at 1 p.m. from a 69-year-old person who died in Buffalo. It headed for Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, where a New York social worker with liver cancer, Delyla Torres, 48, was being prepped for surgery to receive it.

Minutes before her late-afternoon operation was to begin, the lights went out. The hospital had a backup generator which restored power, but because of the lengthy and complicated nature of a liver transplant operation, Torres' doctors did not consider it safe to proceed. She would have to await another transplant opportunity after the blackout ended.

No one in the world of organ transplantation, where need far outnumbers donors, wanted the liver wasted. It had to be rushed to a transplant center outside the blackout region, with a blood type B recipient capable of hasty, impromptu arrival for surgery. That was UPMC and Birr, who knew nothing of the circumstances except time was of the essence.

He went into surgery at 2 a.m., received the liver around 5, got out about 9:30 in the morning still unconscious. It was 7:30 p.m. when he finally woke up and heard how and why he became the organ's new host.

The New York Times published a story the next day noting the blackout's twist in plans for the liver. The story didn't name Birr and Torres, but he knew he was the one described as benefiting from a sicker liver patient's misfortune.

"I felt really bad, but I didn't dwell on it," Birr recalled. "I didn't know about it at the time, and even if I had, I'd have said, 'Let's do it.' "

Birr only needed six days of hospital recuperation before returning home to heal in the latest phase of a much-needed life's turnaround.

He described a childhood of successive obstacles and trauma. His mother raised him alone in McKeesport, only to die of breast cancer when he was 11. He was sent to the small town of Oswego, Kan., to live with a father who had little use for him and who ran afoul of the law himself. Birr ended up in a series of foster homes, never graduating from high school, before joining the Army in 1969.

He said that's where three decades of drug and alcohol abuse began. His fellow soldiers were abusers even in basic training. He joined in those habits there and in Vietnam, where he was on search-and-destroy missions as a specialist fourth class in 1970-71.

For years after returning home, he drank whiskey and used beer to wash it down. He said he used about every harmful drug available to him, from smoking pot to snorting cocaine to injecting heroin. He lasted temporarily in a series of retail jobs while living first in Massachusetts, then McKeesport, then Monroeville, but sometimes would be fired for his drinking. He had one unsuccessful marriage and fathered two children with whom he had little contact.

Birr, in other words, spent his first half-century on the Earth with little to show for it but a damaged liver, which he figures the drugs and alcohol earned him. He said he cleaned up for good in February 2001, after a nightmarish experience of hemorrhaging blood during a drinking bout and almost dying on the trip to the hospital.

He dedicated himself afterward to exercise, nutrition and abstinence from drugs and alcohol, even though the hepatitis had already afflicted him and caused the potentially fatal cirrhosis as well. He hopes a lifetime of problems left him when the bad liver did.

"If I look back at all the things I've done to myself and to other people, I don't deserve the liver, but I got it," Birr said.

The best news since the operation was that Torres finally became eligible for another liver and underwent a successful transplant Dec. 3. It's something Birr said he had prayed for, though he's had no contact with the New York woman about their unusual connection.

"I was just very elated, because she certainly needed a liver more than I did," he said.

Birr had just left a job with a furniture store, about to begin employment with another furniture retailer, when his operation took place. His former employer's insurance covered the cost of his $400,000 transplant. Now he's waiting for the time when he can begin a new job, resume regular biking and marry Westerberg -- on a date still to be set.

He doesn't reflect back much on the relevance of the blackout in all of this, he just knows it's given him a rare chance.

"And I do know one thing," he stressed, "I'm going to live the rest of my life healthy as I can."

E-mail this story   Print this story