This is truly a match made in heaven

Friday, Sept. 20, 2002 | 2:52 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION: Sept. 21, 2002

When Jess Coleman said "I do" to Nicole Munda in May, little did he know that in addition to giving her his heart, he would find himself giving her a piece of his liver.

It was a confirmation that the Henderson couple were meant for each other.

They were only acquaintances when they were growing up in Carlin, in northeast Nevada -- after all, Jess was six years older than Nicole.

Coleman took notice of Munda when she was 19 and they went on a rafting trip in the same group. He felt a spark, but she didn't.

But fate would give them another chance. Ten year later, in October 2001, they found themselves sitting next to one another at a NASCAR race in Phoenix, amid a crowd of 125,000 people in non-assigned seats.

That sealed the deal. They started dating and got married on May 4.

A week later Nicole, who had the rare liver disease primary sclerosing cholangitis -- the ailment that killed pro football star Walter Payton -- was at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., in grave need of a liver.

Doctors said Nicole had at best six months to live without a transplant, and few are ever available.

The hospital decided to try a relatively new procedure called a live donor transplant, where a healthy person with the same blood type and other matching factors gives up 60 percent of his liver to an afflicted person.

After Nicole's mother and her two sisters were determined not to be suitable donors, Jess offered to go through the battery of tests to see if he was a match.

Defying the odds, Jess turned out to be a perfect match for Nicole.

On July 3 Nicole Coleman became the 15th live donor liver recipient, and the Colemans became the first spousal liver donor/recipient in the history of the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. Dr. David Mulligan performed the surgery.

But the Colemans' one-in-a-million love story, doctors say, is an even rarer success story in the world of organ transplants. Despite the growing success of live donor transplants, doctors say it won't be enough to save the thousands of lives lost each year because people refuse, even in death, to donate their vital organs to save others.

"Each day 16 people die in the United States because there are no kidneys, hearts, livers and other organs available," said Dr. David Douglas, medical director of liver transplants at the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. "We prefer cadaveric transplants because with live donor transplants there is risk to the donor -- a 1/2 to 1 percent chance they could die."

Jess, a 36-year-old local truck driver and former Elko sheriff's deputy and gold miner, said such a risk meant nothing to him.

"If I didn't give her part of my liver, she had no chance to live," he said. "There was no way I could live with myself if I just watched her wither away when there was something I could have done."

Nicole, a 30-year-old, 12-year resident of Southern Nevada who works for Allied Innovations, said, "With his liver, I also got his stubbornness. I never believed in destiny until that day in Phoenix. And, although I felt real close to him before the operation, I feel so much closer to Jesse now."

Jess went into their marriage fully aware that his bride could die from her disease. He found out about it long before their needle-in-a-haystack meeting at the racetrack in Phoenix, because Jess and Nicole's mother, Jan, worked at the same Carlin mine and ironically had carpooled for years.

"When she told me about Nicole's illness, I thought it sucked that a woman so young was afflicted with a fatal disease," Jess said, noting that on a wall of his home was a photo of him with Nicole and several friends from their 1991 rafting trip. "Every time I looked at that photo, I'd wondered if she was OK."

Then came that fateful meeting in Phoenix.

"When we were sitting next to each other, I said to myself, 'I know this guy from somewhere,' " Nicole said. "When we realized who each other was, Jesse looked at me sadly and asked how I was doing, and I knew he knew I had PSC."

Although Nicole was optimistic she would one day survive her ailment, she lived her life day to day and week to week, staying away from long-term commitments. As a result she did not call Jess after that day at the racetrack.

But Jess refused to allow Nicole to slip away again, and the two began a long-range courtship. In February he quit his job in Carlin and moved to Henderson. Three months later they married.

Nicole Coleman, who did not drink alcohol, did not use hypodermic needles and did not engage in unsafe sex -- the main factors that contribute to many common liver diseases -- still contracted PSC in 1998.

In November 2001 she was put on a list for a liver transplant, but doctors gave her little hope she would receive one.

"In the United States, we have 17,000 people on the list for a liver," Douglas said, noting that there were just 5,000 available last year for cadaveric transplants. "Because of the shortage, we have turned to live donor transplants. In 1997 only three such operations were performed. Last year about 400."

Douglas said the liver and skin are the only two human body parts that can regenerate. He said a divided liver gains normal function in both the donor and recipient in a few days. Both livers eventually grow to near normal size.

The Mayo Clinic Scottsdale is proud of its success rate for both live donor and cadaveric liver transplants. But even amid so much success, there is the reality that doctors can do only so much.

With live donors the hospital has an 85 percent success rate one year after transplants, which is about the national average. The hospital has performed 117 cadaveric liver transplants with a 90 percent success rate after one year, 3 percentage points better than the national average.

Since the operation, Jess has returned to his job at Nevada Compressed Gas, but Nicole cannot go back to work for several months.

Every day, for the rest of her life, Nicole has to take prescribed medicine to prevent her body from rejecting the liver. The medicine costs her $200 a month with her insurance. Without insurance, the drugs would cost her $3,000 a month.

The Colemans have set up an account to help defray more than $500,000 in medical costs related to her transplant. It's the Nicole Munda Coleman Transplant Fund, Wells Fargo Bank, Account No. 1013315187. To date, about $5,000 has been raised.

The pair, who both carry organ donor cards and urge others to do so, have prospects for a long, and happy future together. After a year of recovery, she can even think about having a baby.

"Before the operation, I was real hesitant to discuss the future," Nicole said. "I didn't want to get my hopes up. Now we can talk about things like our next big purchase, having children ...

"Growing old," Jess said.

"Yeah," Nicole said with a broad smile and look of wonderment. "Growing old."