MASSEY—Summer visitors and residents of Little Current have become familiar with the melodic voice of Beth Knibbs as she sings a repertoire of popular tunes, with the help of a small amplifier, as she performs in Expositor Square. Today she is hanging on the edge of a catastrophic liver failure and desperately needs a living donor to step forward to save her life.
Unfortunately, Ms. Knibbs was diagnosed with William’s Disease, a genetic disorder that prevents her body from being able to excrete copper. As it builds up, copper becomes toxic to the body, attacking the liver and the brain.
“It made her liver fail,” said her husband Leslie Knibbs, a longtime contributor to the Anishinabek News. The therapies designed to combat the condition have kept helped keep her healthy for almost 30 years. In fact, her last checkup showed that she was holding her own nicely. But then quite suddenly, her liver failed.
The result has been that her abdominal cavity is filling with fluid. “She looks about seven or eight months pregnant,” said Mr. Knibbs. The couple had originally gone to the emergency room at the Espanola hospital, but that proved fruitless. “They just sent her home,” he said. “It didn’t get better and we felt completely helpless.”
A call to her specialist got a much different reaction. When they got to a hospital in Barrie, the tests indicated that Ms. Knibbs’ liver had completely failed.
Mr. Knibbs said his wife’s health is “very rough.”
The 47-year-old (she will be 48 this month) singer followed a very healthy lifestyle, including yoga and a daily regimen that included walking every day and “a lot of swimming.” She was in the peak of health, despite her illness lurking in the shadows. “Her last checkup was about a year and a half ago,” said Mr. Knibbs. “It came on so suddenly like a rampage.”
Ms. Knibbs is on the transplant list, with her MELD score sitting at 20 out of 45 (a MELD score is used to estimate relative disease severity and likely survival of patients awaiting liver transplantation). “Those in the 40s are next in line,” explained Mr. Knibbs. “Right now we are in a purgatory.” The medical treatment is simply holding her in place; without a donor, her prognosis is fatal.
“We have had someone from Sagamok (where Ms. Knibbs was working at Bidabaan) who has stepped forward to be tested and they have started the process,” said Mr. Knibbs. “The community has really been very supportive; they have been fantastic.”
In a living donor situation, a chunk of the donor’s liver is removed and placed in the recipient’s body. Recovery for the donor is fairly rapid, and their own liver regenerates to within 90 percent of its original size fairly quickly. For the recipient the transplant is just the start of a long path back to health but removes the death sentence from over Ms. Knibbs’ head.
To learn more about liver transplants and to sign up to provide the gift of life to Ms. Knibbs, go to www.liver.ca and follow the links.
The family is also struggling financially and any donations to help offset medical and living expenses will be gratefully accepted. A GoFundMe account has been set up and can be accessed by searching Leslie Knibbs at GoFundMe.com.
For now, Mr. Knibbs and his 14-year-old son Scottie are waiting by the phone, hoping it will ring with good news.
