Chelsea Noda is an amazing little girl. She amazed her parents and surgeons in San Diego, Calif. when, just three days after receiving open-heart surgery that threatened her life, she was running down the halls of the hospital. At the
Chelsea Noda is an amazing little girl.
She amazed her parents and surgeons in San Diego, Calif. when, just three days after receiving open-heart surgery that threatened her life, she was running down the halls of the hospital.
At the tender age of 2.
Now 5 and with all the pep of the normal kindergarten student she is, it was hard for her to keep still while her father explained to an audience of around 50 Kaua’i frequent blood donors the ordeal she has been through since Roy and Kathy Noda traveled to China to adopt her in 1999.
They had been told of her heart problems, that without some corrective surgery her life expectancy would be somewhere in the 30s, and that her quality of life would diminish rapidly in her 20s.
When they got her to America and took her to a pediatric cardiologist, they got worse news: Congestive heart failure that required medications three times a day and high-risk surgery to fix a defective heart that pumped 120 times a minute while Chelsea was at rest, and had grown so much that it was expanding her chest cavity.
A normal resting heartbeat is 50 to 60 beats a minute, Roy Noda said.
The surgery required four to six units (pints) of blood, and today her heart is back to normal.
“Thank you for giving blood and helping children like me,” she said Wednesday at the Blood Bank of Hawai’i annual Kaua’i donor recognition luncheon at the Hyatt Regency Kaua’i Resort and Spa.
“Each and every pint that you guys donate means so much,” said Roy Noda, a donor himself. “You’re just really saving precious human lives.”
He called donations of blood made freely with the realization that the donor likely will never know the recipient “true, pure giving.” It is “a way to give back to the community. Each generation should give back,” he said.
Noda reiterated Blood Bank of Hawai’i figures that just 60 percent of the state’s population is eligible to give, and just 2 percent of that 60 percent actually donates.
“That makes you guys extra special,” he told the audience of donors and volunteers.
Natalie Frazier, 12, literally danced across the room where the luncheon was held, personally delivering leis to all the donors and volunteers. When the spirited middle school student took the microphone to explain her recent ordeal with cancer, though, the emotions of the moment caused her to dramatically draw somber.
Over a year of her life went by when she couldn’t be on the swim team, or play basketball, or do all the things she loves and was used to doing. Chemotherapy for 13 months was required to fight the lymphoma, which is now in remission.
“I’m getting there,” she said of her journey back to a normal life after getting the diagnosis in April 2000 and surviving the grueling chemotherapy regimen and its side-effects.
The experience has given her wisdom way beyond her tender years. It made her realize, she said, that everyone dies, so every day must be lived to the fullest, making the most of the life you’re given.
And as cancer patients are recipients of around 35 percent of all donated blood, she said she also realizes that the people in the Hyatt ballroom who have donated blood at least 56 times (56 pints, or seven gallons, qualifies men and women as Super Donors) have helped sustain life for hundreds of cancer patients like her.
For that gift, she said “thank you” in 10 different languages. “There is no greater word than ‘thank you,’ ” she added.
Staff Writer Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
