"It was an epic RV road trip for three generations of women headed west, but with one major twist. They were delivering a 15-year-old girl in need of a double-lung transplant through a pandemic from Cole Harbour to a hospital in Toronto.
Tahlia Ali was scheduled to have a complex surgery to replace her lungs at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in April, but everything was put on hold when COVID-19 took its toll.
She waited for weeks with her mother, Lisa, in isolation in their Cole Harbour home, until her condition worsened, making the risk of travelling to Toronto necessary in May.
Tahlia has idiopathic pulmonary hypertension. It’s rare and it means the pulmonary arteries which carry blood to the lungs are progressively restricted, causing pressure to build and not enough oxygenated blood to reach her lungs.
“She also has a couple holes in her heart,” explained her mother Lisa Ali. “They don’t know whether those holes were there first and they caused the pulmonary hypertension, or that the pulmonary hypertension caused the holes to develop.”
The holes in her heart are actually a blessing as they release some of the pressure built up by the closing arteries, Lisa said. The holes will be fixed during the transplant surgery, but Tahlia’s heart is overworked, enlarged and she is going into heart failure on the right side."
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