PHS teacher marks transplant milestone

Wasilla—Since he had a driver license, a Palmer High teacher listed himself as a potential organ donor because he considered it the socially responsible thing to do. On Sunday, he marks the 10th anniversary of living with the liver of a woman about whom he knows nothing.

As he marks 10 years of a fairly normal life thanks to the woman’s selfless gift, he has a simple message to others: Be a donor.

Andrew Fournier’s transformation from card-carrying organ donor to recipient came almost in an instant.

After teaching eight years in Minto, Huslia, Fort Yukon and Kivalina, he and his family moved to Fairbanks, where he took a long-term substitute-teaching gig that was expected to become a full-time post.

“One day I was teaching and one of my students said I was turning yellow,” Fournier recalled. He chided the student for trying to distract him, but the other students chimed in that indeed the teacher had a distinctly yellow hue.

“I felt fine and suddenly, something isn’t working,” Fournier said.

What happened from here is a blur for Fournier — first the clinic and then the hospital and then a medical flight to Seattle. The diagnosis was Wilson’s disease, in which the liver stops eliminating copper. He was 36 years old, with hardly a sick day in his life.

His wife, Tami, picks up the narrative. She said by the time she was able to get a mercy flight to Seattle a few hours later, Andrew was on full life support.

“He was just hooked to everything when I walked in,” Tami recalled. “My knees hit the floor. I thought he was dead.”

In essence, he was. His brain function had stopped by the time they got the life-saving call.

“They called and said, ‘We have a liver,’” Tami said.

A woman was killed in a car accident. Either she or her family made her organs available for transplant.

But with Andrew near death and other potential transplant recipients waiting, someone had to decide if the liver would be wasted on the Alaska teacher.

They asked Tami, “What do you want us to do?”

“I told them to fix him. I wasn’t leaving there without him,” she said.

Ultimately, it was the decision of the lead surgeon. Tami said he was a man with strong religious convictions.

“He’s telling me, ‘God’s telling me to do this. It’s going to be OK,’” Tami said.

So while Andrew, whose views on religion are “wildly nondenominational,” lay dying, a surgeon who felt led by God to save him performed the long, complicated operation.

“There’s a certain irony to it all,” Andrew admitted. He teaches English and IB (international baccalaureate) philosophy at Palmer High, his ninth year there.

When he woke up after surgery, he did so quoting Lord Byron as Tami came into the hospital room.

“And the surgeon said, ‘Praise the Lord,’” Tami recalled.

By whoever’s hand or faith, the transplant was successful and Fournier was quickly on the road to recovery. But not without a few bumps. He said he was partially paralyzed and suffered a type of temporary retardation, knowing all the while he did, and not knowing if it would pass.

It would take weeks, but both his movement and his intellect returned.

“You could see the process as the toxins filtered out,” Tami said.

They knew he’d be OK when someone asked him, at the end of 2000, who the president was.

“That depends on who you ask,” Fournier responded, in reference to the disputed Bush-Gore election results.

It would be Christmas Eve before the Fourniers could return to Alaska. Even then, their troubles weren’t over. Because Andrew was a substitute teacher at the time of his attack, he wasn’t covered by medical insurance. They had to sell off most of their possessions to be eligible for Medicaid so his huge hospital bill would be covered.

Financially wiped out, they moved to North Carolina for about a year, where Andrew taught and finished recovering, despite setbacks that severely damaged his kidneys. With the pay scale too low in North Carolina to pay a living wage for the Fourniers, including son, Torrey, 6, they returned to Alaska, where Andrew got his job at PHS, close to good medical care.

He takes a lot of pills and has blood tests three times a year to make sure he’s functioning OK, but otherwise has resumed a normal life.

“Part of the beauty of having it work is I can get beyond it and go on with my life,” Fournier said of the transplant.

Tami said his analytical way of viewing life helped Andrew survive the ordeal.

“He never felt sorry for himself,” she said.

The Wasilla man said living those years in the Bush helped steel him.

“You get inculcated with the sense that you do it or die,” he said; you do the things that need to be done, without wasting the energy to worry how it will turn out.

He is open with his students about his transplant.

“I do think it’s important to point out people get replacement parts,” Fournier said.

And for anyone considering whether they will be a donor like him and the woman who saved his life, he has a much more direct and unvarnished message.

“I encourage everyone to do the same,” Fournier said. “Not doing that is kind of an implicit murder.”

He said it is kind of freaky to be asked at the Division of Motor Vehicles, “Can we dismember you if you die?” But it is important to say “yes.”

Tami said she wasn’t a donor before her husband’s transplant; she’d never given it much thought.

“I don’t think it’s talked about enough,” she said. “It wasn’t until my husband needed a liver that I considered that someone else might need mine.”