Utah baby gets a new lease on life with a liver transplant

It's a perfect summer evening — the kind that makes kids want to be free in the outdoors — but 8-month-old Harmonee Phillips is inside a quiet hospital room at the end of a long hallway in Primary Children's Medical Center, struggling to breathe.

Her father stands by her tiny hospital bed fashioned with metal bars, like a crib, speaking to her softly, touching her cheek, trying to get her to smile. The room is sterile, smelling of antiseptic and medicine and the lights are off, which gives the soft — though frequent — tones on the machines clustered nearby the ambience of a lullaby, though they are alarms. She's been in this room — No. 4408 — for seven days, after a 6-week stay in the pediatric intensive care unit, after receiving a liver transplant that saved her life.

Her mother, Farrah Phillips, sits quietly in an uncomfortable chair with her back to the window, where the foothills glow from the brunt of the late-day sun. She knows these hospital rooms well. Each one is marked in her mind as a place of significance: where Harmonee was diagnosed, the place she waited for surgery, where she almost died, where she beat the odds and lived — it goes on.

Six months earlier, on Dec. 22, when her green-eyed, dark-haired baby was diagnosed with a rare liver disease called Biliary Atresia, 20-year-old Phillips unwittingly joined the ranks of many mothers of sick children who fight for their lives as soon as they begin and ultimately rely on organ donation to survive. Though statistics say only one in 15,000 children is born with Biliary Atresia — the primary cause of liver transplants in children — the number of cases being treated at Primary Children's has been unusually high over the last six months. Doctors aren't sure why, but so far this year, with 10 transplants already performed, the liver transplant program is on track to double its amount of operations performed this year over last year.

Harmonee's story is not unlike many of the transplants performed at Primary Children's this year. She was deathly ill before receiving a donated liver, and now, though her breathing is still labored from lungs that had been failing with sickness, she is growing and thriving. Through this process, her family has been changed forever, witnessing miracles, finding new friends, learning new medical skills and tolerating tragedy. But for now, Phillips has had enough.

She wants No. 4408 to be the last room in the hospital she comes to know. She wants to bring her daughter home.