Homeless Girl Needs a New Home to Get New Organs

There's a young girl in Chicago who can't get the lung transplant she desperately needs because she doesn't have a home. At just 14 years old, Ronnie Walker is acutely aware that without two new lungs, she will die. She's currently being kept alive with medication. The major barrier to getting her on the transplant list is a stable place to live. She and her mom have been nomads, moving from one place to the next.

Since Ronnie and her mom don't live on the street, in transitional housing, or in a shelter, they are part of a difficult-to-count portion of the homeless population. They move from place to place, often the couches of friends and family, because they cannot afford an apartment of their own. Each stay, obviously, is limited, as their host's resources or patience wears thin.

Ronnie's story presents an issue we don't discuss enough. We know that the homeless need a place where they can sleep in their own beds, but a home goes beyond a place to rest your head and put your stuff. A home is also a place to convalesce, especially needed for the quarter of the homeless who have acute health problems and the nearly half who have chronic ones. That's a very large number of sick homeless people, most of whom, it's safe to assume, aren't having the easiest time getting better.

In a shelter, people sometimes need surgery.  And in a shelter, there are myriad ways things can go wrong, like a post-operative infection picked up in a bathroom that's shared with a couple of dozen people. Add to that the stress of trying to recover without privacy, quiet or space. It's not easy to change bandages, for example, when you don't have your own sink. Where I work, there is medical shelter where we send people in situations like these, and it's smaller, more private and equipped with a medical staff. But we'd hope to help the person get housing before surgery is necessary. Preventing and ending homelessness would be an even better solution, but we work with what we have.

By managing to escape staying in a shelter, Ronnie, ironically, doesn't have the "luxury" of a social service staff to help get her the housing she and her mom need. Luckily, she does have the help of a good doctor and a concerned hospital social worker who are asking that her community step in and help. If you would like to help Ronnie please contact her doctor, Robert Love, at Loyola University Health System at 708-216-0417. Your help could mean the difference between life and death for a young homeless girl.

Photo credit: Steve Snodgrass