I hope and pray that with scientific advances that we will beable to clone a piece of a healthy person's liver.

Hi, I am Linda Riso's sister. Linda is the middle child so you all know how that is some of the time. Linda is younger than me by 3 years. She actually was an easy baby with what I remember, as she got older we realized that she was very, very smart. Linda can be a challenge for me. She can be exasperating, so if you are working on something with her, everything is extremely easy for her, but Linda doesnt always have a lot of empathy, in a common sense kind of way. After saying the above I think back on all the things my sister has accomplished. Linda never liked school because she was bored. She got married at 18 and was only married 6 weeks when her husband died in a tragic accident. It was then that you realized how much grit and determination my sister has. She did more with that determination than anyone I know. She ordered medical equipment at a medical supply store and from there she went to ordereing medical hardware at the hospital and went in to the surgeries so she would know and understand exactly what she had to order. Through her work at the hospital she got a job at the Red Cross harvesting skin, tendons ect. It seemed like an unusual job for someone with no formal training or higher education. She proved she was up to the task and flourished. When she started to move to her next challenge, she started managing medical offices, and advancing to vice president of Milford Hospital where she resisided for 10 years during that time she designed most of the off site building interiors and managed the hospital out patient medical offices. Each job she stored info in her brain and saved and used for her next job. She has now been practice administrator for a private practice for over 10 years. And she is still working there but with her changes in her liver gradually Linda's been having a harder time.

There have been many challanges since Linda has been ill, from being in and out of the hospital to having enough strengh to do the work which she truly loves. Linda has not been feeling well enough to do the things with her friends, family and pets. But with that aside one of the hardest things is acceptance that all of her siblings, who she is very close with, are not eligible donors. Either do to age or Hemachromatosis. Linda has always been in charge of herself and the many animals that she has had over all the years. She was always working on a new project at home, from putting up a retainer wall and a stone patio, to decorating the 5 houses that she and her husband have owned over the the past 20 years. She also had 4 labradors and then went on to breeding german shepard puppies. She and her husband Mike now have 4 German Shepard's and one Labrador and 4 donkeys. She and her husband would like to work in some capacity with children with special needs incorporating the animals. I truly believe that Linda can do anything thart's put in front of her and make it work. However this liver issue has been a tough one. She has done everything the transplant team has asked of her but her meld score always puts her in the bottom of the list. For the first time in her life she has to accept that even though she has done everything that's been asked of her she can' change the numbers. Linda has always been a bean pole her entire life so this has been a challenge with the diet she needs to be on. When Linda's body isn't working at the level she wants, she is very difficult to reason with. Which I understand she is desperate, she will die without a donor.

A transplant could mean she could go forward, with the work she was planning to do with her animals, to better another persons life. Linda would be able to go to work in the morning and enjoy the patients like she did before she got sick. We all know that unless this transplant goes thru with a live donor, Linda will most likely die because she is at the bottom of the transplant list because she is too skinny to gain the weight needed but she cant eat enough to change the numbers due to other complications.

I do hope and pray that that she will figure out how to manage this horrible illness and someone with a healthy liver can donate a piece of there's. I truly love my sister and pray every day that all the people that are dealing with liver disease find a way to clone livers.