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Living a story book existence
Mamie Bender beholden to supporting cast

At first meeting, Mamie Bender seems pretty much like the rest of us. She's quiet at first, but she's got a hearty laugh and plenty of friends. But Mamie Bender has led no ordinary life. In fact, she likes to say her life is a bit of a fairy tale. And she's happy she can play the part.

That tale began in 1991 when Mamie, who works at the Nashville American Red Cross blood center, was given a liver by an anonymous donor. She is alive because of that donor and because many others donated more than 50 pints of blood through the American Red Cross.

It's one of the ironic twists of the tale that Mamie Bender received the gift of life with the very help of the organization for which she worked. At the time, in fact, Mamie's job at the Red Cross had an indirect part in finding blood donors. Her role was to round up, schedule and encourage volunteers to work bloodmobiles throughout the Tennessee Valley Region. But, Mamie's health had deteriorated so rapidly, even her co-workers didn't know Mamie's life was on the line.

In late 1991, Mamie was on the job, trying to work through the flu-like symptoms that had plagued her for weeks. A few days later, she was lying in a Nashville hospital semicomatose. The symptoms - nausea, exhaustion, headaches and, finally, jaundice - were not brought on by the flu. Her liver had shut down.

Her name was placed at the top of the national liver transplant registry. "They didn't think I'd make it through Saturday night," Mamie says of her doctors and family. But that same day a liver was located. By 6:30a.m. Sunday, Vanderbilt University Medical Center doctors began a 12-hour liver transplant surgery. Between dawn and dusk, Mamie's Red Cross co-workers shipped ten pints of red cells, 11 units of frozen plasma, 12 units of platelets and 20 of cryoprecipitate for an unnamed Vanderbilt patient undergoing liver transplant surgery. The next day, they learned the blood products had gone to their fellow employee and friend, Mamie Bender.

Mamie's recovery took months: she had to learn to stand, walk, eat and bathe all over again. While she still takes daily maintenance medications and visits the doctor twice yearly, Mamie is healthy today. The horrible disease, the transplant, the recovery is almost a memory.

"Ninety-nine percent of the time I don't think of it," she says. But then she remembers the liver someone gave her, and the freely given blood she couldn't have done without. She'd like to thank those donors. And she'd like them to see how well she's doing now.

"When you stop and think about it, it's like a fairy tale," she says. "You think about it happening to other people, but you don't think about it happening to you."