Saturday, November 24, 2007

By NANCY KRUH / The Dallas Morning News

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on Sept. 15, 1996.

BOWIE, Texas – If Jody Bell was in the parade of walking disasters that appear on those tell-all talk shows, there'd hardly be enough room at the bottom of the TV screen to list everything that's happened to her in her 18 years:

Abandoned by her mother, taken in by dirt-poor grandparents who died before she was grown, endured a liver transplant to save her life, suffered the accidental death of her brother.

But don't count on seeing Jody on TV weeping and moaning about poor, pitiful her.The way she sees it, she's just your average, everyday kind of college freshman. She just happened to take the long way around.

And it's not like she's done it alone. Along with her grandparents, there were a few thousand others who kept her going: All the folks around Bowie who pooled their nickels, dimes and quarters for her lifesaving surgery. And the nurses and hospital volunteer who got Jody to thinking maybe she could grow up and be like them. And the cousins, classmates and teachers who befriended her, stood by her, then stood up and cheered for her when she won the big scholarship that's sending her to college.

Politics aside, it really did take a village to raise this child.

"I have this incredible feeling," says Jody, "of just being loved."

As she talks, her fingers delicately curl her hair behind one ear, then the other.

She's sitting in a booth at the Golden Corral, where she's been a waitress for two years. She's got the afternoon off, but the restaurant is still a place to hang out in this town of 5,000 about 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth.

In a soft voice that easily gives way to girlish giggles, Jody talks easily about herself, but there's no self-promotion here. About 90 minutes into the conversation, she just happens to mention the $16,000 scholarship she earned from a hometown foundation to go to Texas Woman's University in Denton.

Did she say $16,000?

Yes. Shy giggle.

Maybe somebody else should be telling Jody Bell's story. Any number of folks can. Everybody around here has known her since she was 7 or 8.

That was back when Jody, her younger brother and sister all lived with her grandparents in a ramshackle house a few miles outside Bowie. All five were surviving on the couple's meager pension. They didn't have much to give their grandchildren, friends say, besides love.

Right before Jody started second grade, she looked in a mirror and noticed the whites of her eyes had turned to yellow. She tried the only medicine she knew, a drop or two of Visine. By the time she began school, the school nurse noticed Jody – now sickly and lethargic – had turned completely sallow.

Within days, she was sent to Children's Medical Center in Dallas, where tests revealed she was dying from a rare liver disease. Her only hope was a transplant, at the time a new and radical procedure. She also learned she had neither insurance nor aid to cover the $125,000 surgery.

One of Jody's neighbors shared news of the hopeless situation with a friend, an oil-field salesman from nearby Nocona named Bill Crabtree.

Mr. Crabtree had never met the little girl, but that didn't matter. "It just worked over me," he says today.

As a Shriner, he'd participated in fund-raising efforts for children's hospitals, yet he'd never taken on anything like this. But he quickly enlisted his fellow Shriners in the cause, "and we just went to work. We begged and, of all things, the [Montague] county commissioners started the fund with $10,000. Then the newspapers picked up on it, and money just came from everywhere."

All over the Bowie area, jars and milk cartons sat at checkout stands, asking people to donate their spare change. And Mr. Crabtree and his friends went calling, passing the hat at meetings and auctions and anywhere else people gathered. The Dallas hospital pitched in, too, setting aside a $15,000 gift for the surgery.

Today, Jody says she remembers knowing that the money was being raised, but she says she was too sick for the magnitude of the effort to sink in. What remains vivid in her memory was the intimate circle around her, created by her grandparents, who stayed with her as much as they could, as well as by the hospital staff.

"I remember her grandfather just sitting there in a rocking chair, just rocking," says Janie Means, a hospital volunteer, "and Jody would climb up in his lap and sit there for hours."

A Dallas homemaker, Ms. Means has been volunteering at Children's for years, but she says few of the hundreds of children she has befriended have tugged at her heart quite like Jody.

"There are some you're just drawn to," Ms. Means says. "She was just one of those kids. She just kind of sparkles."

The nurses, too, were noticing something special about the little girl. "She just persevered in her typical 'Jody' fashion," says Lisa Milonovich, one of the nurses.

"She had good days and bad days just like everybody else, but she hung in there. She was never one to complain a whole lot."

Once Jody had her transplant – on Feb. 28, 1986 – her new, healthy organ let her livelier self show. There was Jody, now reading stories in the playroom to the younger patients. Or challenging anyone who happened her way to a game of Skip-Bo. Or giggling with her new best friend, another transplant patient, as they conspired to paint their fingernails purple.

What had almost taken Jody's life had also transformed it – a paradox perhaps, but it makes perfect sense to Jody and the people who know her. The transplant was both the very worst and very best thing that could have happened to her.

Jody left the hospital in April 1986 not only with a new liver, but with far more attention and generosity than she could have imagined possible. She'd widened her view to take in a world where people were highly skilled and dedicated. She understood she could make something of herself - and now she had a dream. She wanted to be a nurse working with transplant patients at Children's Medical Center.

After her release, it wasn't hard for Jody to figure out she also was a celebrity around Bowie. Somehow, says Janie Means, at age 8, Jody knew to accept the attention with grace and aplomb.

Ms. Means remembers a trip with Jody to Bowie's Wal-Mart soon after she'd gotten out of the hospital. "It was like a parting of the waters," Ms. Means says. "You'd hear someone say, 'I think that's Jody Bell.' Or, 'Oh, look – there's Jody Bell.' By the time we'd been there 10 minutes there was a whole crowd around her. She just smiled. . . . There's such an innocence about her that you don't find in other people. And it's so genuine."

But the softness wasn't all that was revealed by the illness, say those who know her. There also was steel. In the days to come, Jody would have to rely on it again and again.

Over the next year, she was in and out of the hospital, battling back when her body tried to reject the liver. During one lengthy stay, her grandfather took ill, then died. Ms. Means and two nurses checked Jody out of the hospital for the day so she could attend the funeral.

By the time Jody's health was stabilizing, her grandmother's was beginning to fail. Then another blow: In a freak accident, her 9-year-old brother, Josh, was swept away in spring floodwater and drowned. And yet one more blow: Her best friend from her hospital stays died from complications that spun out of the transplant.

In 1989, when Jody was 12, her grandmother moved into a nursing home. Both Jody and her sister were taken in by a second cousin and her husband, whom Jody now considers her parents. Her grandmother died when she was 16.

Why would so much tragedy befall a child? Jody doesn't dwell on that question.

So how about this question: Why is Jody Bell still smiling?

"Any one circumstance in her life would throw any of us for a loop," says Ms. Means. "It's hard to explain this kid."

Maybe it's in her genes. Maybe it's because of the way her grandparents raised her. Or maybe there's a thousand-year-old shaman's soul inhabiting the body of a small-town Texas girl.

"A lot of people, they don't really look at death as a part of life," she says. "They're here and want to go have fun, but they don't realize they won't be here forever. I realize you're not. You've got to do the things while you're here."

And so Jody has done "the things."

In high school, she was unstoppable: National Honor Society, band council, yearbook staff, flag corps. At the Golden Corral, she was working up to 30 hours a week. Somewhere she found time to be friendly enough to be elected "class favorite."

"Everybody knew who she was, and I can't think of a person who didn't like her," says her best friend, Kelly Duggan, now a freshman at Tarleton State in Stephenville, Texas.

Kelly remembers all the nights the two girls would stay up late, as best friends do, talking about their lives in the past, present and future tenses. "She's gained from the pain and sorrow," says Kelly. "She's gained wisdom from it instead of letting it get her down."

What's the meaning of life? To Jody, that's a no-brainer.

"To be happy," she says.

"A good career, a good family, a fulfilling life. I guess it's what everybody wants."

It's what Jody is going after now. At TWU, she's studying to be a nurse, her sights still set on Children's.

Being the recipient of so much money, attention and affection - from people like Mr. Crabtree, Janie Means, the nurses and all of Bowie, for that matter – has had its effect on Jody. How could you not feel something if your entire hometown pitched in to save your life?

But, for Jody, wanting to help sick kids isn't just about repaying a debt. If, as Mr. Crabtree says, raising the money for a child's liver transplant "was the most exhilarating thing I ever did," and if, as nurse Lisa Milonovich says, "kids like her are what make me come to work every day," then maybe Jody just wants in on the action, too.

There's no telling what she'll be able to do, taking care of kids occupying the same hospital room she once did. This spring, she got a glimpse of the power of her story when she agreed to speak on the importance of organ donation at a school assembly.

"She's not a public speaker – she was just shaking all over," says Glenda Goodwin, one of Jody's teachers at Bowie High School. "Yet she was just so motivating in what she said, from the standpoint of, 'When you think about not signing that card, think about me.' You could have heard a pin drop."

Jody is a pioneer among liver transplant patients. She's healthy now, but science can't tell how long her replacement will last. But then, whether you've had a liver transplant or not, life doesn't exactly come with guarantees.

For now, Jody holds tight to the words spoken by Roy Curry, president of the Bowie Education Foundation, when he announced at her graduation ceremony that she was the recipient of the $16,000 scholarship. It was earned on merit, as well as need.