‘Bloody competitive’: Welcome to the Olympics for the organ transplant world

Next month, 21-year-old Lauren Ball will sprint down the racetrack at Launceston’s Northern Athletics Centre in Tasmania, her arms and legs pumping as hard as they can, wind in her hair, and air coursing through her lungs.

As a competitor in the 18th Australian Transplant Games she won’t be alone, but will also carry with her the memory of the little boy who gave her these air-filled lungs.

“He would be my age if he were still alive today,” says Ball, who has thought of him as she’s reached milestones she never thought she’d reach – birthdays, graduating from high school, her first job.

Ball was born with a rare genetic lung condition that left her reliant on oxygen 24 hours a day and in need of a wheelchair and BiPAP (bi-level positive airway pressure) support for the first six years of her life.

For parents Helen and Scott, then newlywed and welcoming their first child into the world, it was a terrifying period, fraught with helplessness.

“We literally got told that you will not leave hospital. It was really difficult,” recalls Helen.

But the young couple refused to give up – they did eventually bring Ball home to Jervis Bay, NSW – and realised her only chance at survival was a lung transplant.

“Prior to Lauren, the youngest child that had been transplanted [in Australia] was an 11-year-old. Lauren was only about three, and we kept asking and they kept saying no,” she says.

They knew surgeons overseas were performing lung transplants on patients her age but, after speaking to an American hospital and realising the procedure would cost upwards of $1 million (not to mention the toll of flying that far with a sick child), realised it was a pipe dream.

Finally, when Ball was six, they received the call they’d been hoping for – making her the youngest person in Australia at the time to undergo a lung transplant.

“She had had a few hiccups in there … but she managed to power through it, and it was like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis,” Helen says of watching her daughter thrive post-transplant as she learnt to walk, talk and breathe on her own again.

For Ball, a self-professed bookworm and musical-theatre lover, merely competing in the games is achievement enough, regardless of how she places in September.

“I wanted to test myself and it’s something that pushes me out of my comfort zone,” she says.

“I just went on a 20-minute run and I probably went through every feeling in the world. I got angry, I got upset, but I was happy because I completely did it,” she says, crediting her parents and doctors with continually pushing and believing in her.