Your Referrals Help the Kids #realestate #news #socal
The Lucky Month
All I can say is WOW! I am sitting here at my computer thinking of how grateful I am for the value so many, like you, bring to my real estate business, looking out my home office window and the skies are blue. Spring is here and we can be thankful of our wonderful Southern California weather. | PDF
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For many across this great country it’s still freezing COLD and snowy! We in the Greater Los Angeles area never see a snowflake all winter long unless we decide to go skiiing. It very well could be super stormy or drought dry today here (but it’s not). One thing is for sure, it’s a lucky month as Chris Pine attracts 100 business sponsors to help the kids. #coreychambers
Just like the weather seasons come and seasons go, so do the seasons of life. I’m sure you have noticed, as I have, the older I get the faster the seasons move by. These “seasons of life” go by so fast, my hope is that you enjoy each one or at least grow from each one. Yes. Some of life’s seasons will be HOT and others will be COLD, some high and some low. The lows we want to move by quickly, the highs we want to stay in forever.
So, what does this have to do with you or your home or real estate?
Well, spring is a time of action, people busy trying to get things done they could not do during the winter months. Sort of a renewing of the mind, spirit, of many things GOOD! Hopefully this special season will bring awesome happenings your way as your year unfolds. Wouldn’t it be great to simply just grab your favorite book along with your favorite lounge chair, set it right down in your favorite spot somewhere, outside or next to your window, while looking out on a beautiful Spring day and simply ‘RELAX”. Yea, that would be nice. My hope is that you will get to something like that on more than one occasion this Spring. Really enjoy the place you call home! The NEXT season will be here before you know it.
Unfortunately, there are some that will have a Spring Time they would much rather forget. Like it says in the Seasons of Life, with all the beauty this time of year brings, there is also the ugly for some. Just down the street from where I am typing this, Children’s Hosptial Los Angeles has a full house of kids fighting for their lives. For them and their families, the Ground Hog seeing or not seeing its shadow is the furthest thing from their mind. Don’t get me wrong, these families long to see their kids out in the yard playing or riding their bikes – but for now, they are praying this Spring will be a season of healing.
Your Referrals Help the Kids…
As you may have heard, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is front and center in the fight against nasty diseases that destroy or cut short the lives of children. We are thankful to have such a wonderful facility close by, doing such great work to help heal and save young people. Even though we are eager to enjoy Spring, others are simply hoping they can be here to see it. This is why we here at the Corey Chambers Team have resolved to do what we can to help.
As you know Children’s Hospital depends on sponsorships and donations to help in their work to heal and save the kids. So we have pledged to donate a portion of our income from home sales to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Our goal is to raise $25,000 (we have already raised over $2,800) to help them in their quest to heal, save, cure and comfort children under their care.
This is where you can help…
Life moves fast for some and we are eager to make the Home Selling or Home Buying experience a smooth and rewarding one. Over the last 15 years of helping thousands of home buyers, sellers, landlords and renters, we have met some wonderful, loving, caring people. People like you!
For anyone considering a move that we help, you can rest assured that not only will they get the award-winning service we are known for, but that a portion of the income we receive from the transaction will go toward a very worthy cause.
Your Referrals Really Do Help the Kids…
I want to make it easy to refer your friends, neighbors, associates or family members considering making a move, so here are your options:
You can go to www.ReferralsHelpKids.com and enter their contact info on line or forward the link to who you know considering a move.
Of course you can always call me direct as well at 213-880-9910.
You and your referrals mean more than ever to my team and me. As we move forward in this new season, please know we are extremely thankful for you being a special part of our business.
With all my appreciation.
P.S. The story of this young person enclosed may cause you to look at your loved ones differently. It did me. Check it out.
It’s easy to refer those you know considering buying or selling a home. Here are the options again:
You can go to www.ReferralsHelpKids.com and enter their contact info on line or forward the link to who you know considering a move.
Of course you can always call me direct as well at 213-880-9910.
Why I Support Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles
I grew up right here in Los Angeles. Born right nearby at St. Francis Hospital. I remember when I first heard about a young person close to our family suffering from a nasty disease and getting treated for that at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. It was then that I began to pay closer attention to the work they do at that hospital. Since then, I have learned that it is a collection of hard working health care professionals, most making their home right here in the Los Angeles area, all coming together for a common cause. That cause is to help young people over come unfortunate health issues that life sometimes throws our way. Being a Los Angeles area, California native, I take pride in supporting in any way that I can the good work these people do at Children’s. My team rally’s around our annual goal of raising money and donating portions of our income to help Children’s in their quest to heal young people when they need healing. My team and I are committed to providing outstanding results for buyers and sellers referred to us by our past clients. I have discovered that Children’s Hospital Los Angeles shares similar commitments to their patients. And since their services survive on sponsorships and donations we are happy to contribute and proud to support them.
Sincerely,
888-240-2500
The Curious Case of Kairi
What caused a young girl’s liver and kidney disease? The mystery continues as her doctors plan for a transplant of both organs.
Rachel Lestz, MD, not one to mince words or to conserve them, is abruptly stuck in a pause, halfway between a plausible hypothetical and an oncoming dilemma.
“Am I that curious a person?” she asks herself aloud. She is considering this: If she goes forward with her half of a liver-kidney transplant on Kairi, her 11-year-old nephrology patient whose liver and kidney failure doctors have been unable to diagnose, would she continue to pursue the source of Kairi’s disease even after the transplant is completed? Would there be some therapeutic benefit to knowing—or if not, would trying to satisfy the family’s need for an answer be worth the strain that more testing would cause them?
Meditating on the maybes, if-thens and could-bes has become a vexing part of Kairi’s case, since she presented in September 2016 in the Emergency Department at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles after her pediatrician found her spleen enlarged at an annual exam, and a subsequent blood draw showed low blood cell and platelet counts, a condition called pancytopenia.
At CHLA, the initial suspicion of cancer was dismissed by a clean bone marrow biopsy. But an ultrasound showed abnormalities in the liver and kidney, and biopsies showed the two organs to be engulfed by scar tissue, indicating some prior disorder that left both unable to function adequately. It all bewildered her parents, as Kairi had exhibited no symptoms. “I was always asking her, ‘Do you feel pain’? Do you feel this? Do you feel that?’” her mother, Roxana, says. “She always said no.” “It must have happened so slowly that she didn’t feel anything,” says CHLA nephrologist Nadine Khouzam, MD. “That’s not uncommon with kidney disease. You don’t know you have it because it happens so slowly, until it’s end stage and things don’t work anymore. I can see all that damage, but I don’t know what caused it.” Kairi’s biopsy showed scarring and atrophy that consumed more than 60 percent of her kidneys. “That’s the end.”
‘There’s nothing good about the spleen’
If the end wasn’t in dispute, the beginning would stay muddled. After searching online for information on the drive to CHLA, Kairi’s father, Oscar, knew that an inflamed spleen was serious. “I whispered to my older daughter, ‘There’s nothing good about the spleen,’” he says. “She nodded at me. She understood too.” One of the not-good things about the spleen is that it sits downstream from the liver, so swelling is a sign that blood is backing up into it, the result of a deteriorated liver disrupting blood flow. With blood cells and platelets caught in the spleen, the available number in the regular blood count is lowered—thus the finding of pancytopenia. In addition, Kairi’s level of creatinine, a waste product that gets cleared out by healthy kidneys, was five times the norm.
After biopsies revealed the damage, a group of physicians informed the family, led by Dr. Lestz, Clinical Director of Pediatric Nephrology, and CHLA gastroenterologist George Yanni, MD, Director of the hospital’s Liver Transplant Fellowship Program.
“They take you into a little room, you know?” Oscar says. “I don’t like that room anymore.” They were at first heartened to learn it wasn’t cancer—“a brief moment of whew,” Roxana says. The exhalation was cut short when the doctors explained the extent of the liver and kidney decay couldn’t be undone and would require transplanting of both organs. “Your world at that moment goes upside down,” Roxana says. “You can’t even think about anything else but what they’re going to tell you. I was like, ‘How can that be? She doesn’t look sick!’” Her disbelief, though, never crossed over to denial. “One doctor can be wrong, but a team of the best doctors can’t be wrong.”
Tipping point
Within a few months Kairi’s kidney function sank as her creatinine jumped to 10 times the norm. She “tipped over,” Dr. Lestz says, passing the threshold that forced her to refer Kairi for dialysis, where she would be treated by Dr. Khouzam. At the same time she was placed on the waiting list for a liver-kidney transplant. Dialysis can do the work of the kidneys virtually indefinitely and allow for a manageable, if obstructed, life. The liver is a worse matter. There are life-extending medications for the liver, but none that are life sustaining. Adding to the urgency of finding Kairi a donor is the presence of abnormal veins, called varices, in her esophagus. With scar tissue jamming up blood flow around the liver, the blood tries to wind back to the heart by going through the esophagus, triggering the growth of these enlarged varices. As happened in one frightful episode with Kairi, the veins can burst and bleed out from the large amount of blood they’re ill equipped to be carrying. Dr. Yanni performs regular endoscopies on Kairi to go into the esophagus and band the veins together to keep them from bleeding.
He can’t specify how long Kairi can go without a transplant, but he says, “For any child with liver disease and complications with variceal bleeding, it is a ticking timeclock.” Throughout the case, Dr. Lestz and Dr. Yanni tried to root out the source of Kairi’s extensive disease. Multiple tests scratched off one credible culprit after another: malignancy, infection, metabolic disorders, structural abnormalities. She was negative for Caroli disease, a disorder of the bile ducts that affects both the liver and kidney.
Genetic testing provided no help. It found Kairi had the gene for bare lymphocyte syndrome, wherein a patient is missing or has malfunctioning lymphocytes, a specialized white blood cell that fights infection. Yet outside of the occasional headache and stomachache, Kairi has never been sick. “Her genetic workup didn’t make sense with her clinical picture,” Dr. Khouzam says. The incongruity struck Dr. Lestz as well. “She has so few available white blood cells and her genetic testing tells us those blood cells shouldn’t even work. Well, obviously her white blood cells do work, even though she has less of them. That’s why when we got that result, we were like, OK, that means nothing to us. That does not explain anything.” Importantly, though, they tested for and ruled out any condition that could resurface in transplanted organs, such as an autoimmune condition or a storage disease, a type of metabolic disorder. That and the DNA panel greenlit Dr. Lestz and Dr. Yanni to press ahead. “Originally, Dr. Yanni and I thought we can’t have her undergo transplantation unless we figure out what caused her disease. Once we realized it wasn’t something that would alter her treatment or transplant care, and what we had found wasn’t anything relevant, both Dr. Yanni and I felt comfortable going forward.” Dr. Yanni notes that up to 30 percent of patients with failing livers enter transplantation without a diagnosis, and ultimately the justification is elementary: “Because we have to save the child.”
Naming rights
“I have my own theory,” Kairi says in her chirpy little voice that sounds like sugar and spice but is made of poise and grit. She’s an advanced fifth-grader, with what seems to be paranormal maturity and intelligence. She’s 4 feet tall and gives her weight in kilos (24) because that’s how the scale outputs it in the dialysis unit. She graciously offers to convert it for the metrically flummoxed: 53 pounds. “Back when I was in first grade maybe,” she goes on, “I got really sick and I couldn’t even move out of bed. My ear hurt. My throat hurt. I couldn’t taste things the same way. No one could figure out what was wrong with me. So I think that could have been the start. That could have been an infection that caused everything. The year after, that’s when I got sick.”
She doesn’t spend much time thinking about it any further. However, if her doctors do eventually determine a cause, she wants dibs on it. “I don’t really care as long as I get the transplant, although if it’s a new disease, I want to name it. I’ve been thinking about the L-K disease, like liver-kidney disease, or the Kairi disease. My mom says they will probably name it after the doctor who finds it, but I’m still hoping I can name it.” For Dr. Lestz, the priority now is assuring the family that diagnosing Kairi’s disease would not have cut off its progression. “I don’t know that we’ll really ever get to the bottom of it,” she says, breaking her pause. “The most important message for Kairi and her parents is that we don’t believe her disease could have been prevented. Early knowledge would not have changed her underlying disease. We don’t have some magical medicine that would have cured her.”
Meanwhile the wait for a donor lengthens. The family has three times received calls with news of a donor offer, but as happens often, after review by the transplant team one of the organs proved faulty and there was no match. The team has prepped the family to understand that accepting an offer is several steps off from going forward with the procedure. Upon examination an organ can be deficient in any number of ways.
Roxana tries to see the light in the process. “When they called us the first time, I was so happy,” she says. “I couldn’t stop smiling. Then when they told us no, I was like, OK, next time it will be for something that is going to last. That gives me more hope for Kairi because I know they are looking through everything to make sure it’s going to be good for her. “Every time my phone rings and it says CHLA or the area code is 323, my heart starts pounding because I feel like, oh my god, what if they’re calling us for the transplant? Sooner or later they’re going to call and this is going to be it.”
How you can help
To help kids just like Kairi, refer a friend at www.ReferralsHelpKids.com or call Corey at 213-880-9910.
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Copyright © This free information provided courtesy L.A. Loft Blog and LAcondoInfo.com with information provided by Corey Chambers, Realty Source Inc, BRE#01889449 Story and photos courtesy Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. For more information, contact (213) 880-9910 or visit LAcondoInfo.com Licensed in California. All information provided is deemed reliable but is not guaranteed and should be independently verified. Properties subject to prior sale or rental. This is not a solicitation if buyer or seller is already under contract with another broker. Children’s Hospital Patient Story and photos copyright Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. | PDF
