Laura Scott Ferris, who in 2001 became the first lung retransplant patient at the University of Colorado Hospital, died Nov. 30 at her Lakewood home, one week after her abrupt diagnosis with late-stage leukemia. She was 39.
Diagnosed at 9 months with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that carries a median survival of 30 years, Scott Ferris knew nearly all her life that she would not live long.
By the time she was 16, Scott Ferris had outlived nearly all the other CF children her age.
Among the exceptions was Karen L. Wilson, whom Scott Ferris met as a teenager at a summer camp for CF kids. When Wilson died in 2002 at age 36, Scott Ferris wryly remarked that both of them lived well past age 30 partly to defy specialists who predicted that they would die in adolescence.
“She had a sweet personality, but boy, was she a fighter!” said Sandy Stephens, Scott Ferris’ childhood pastor at Green Mountain United Methodist Church.
Scott Ferris and Wilson remained in touch throughout their lives, buoying one another with phone calls during periodic CF flare-ups, like the one that interrupted Scott Ferris’ studies at Colorado State University, and the episode that prevented Wilson from attending Scott Ferris’ 1996 wedding to Kent Ferris, an investigator in the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.
The wedding took place nearly a year after Scott Ferris’ first lung transplant, and she still reveled in being able to laugh without going into coughing spasms.
“You don’t appreciate breath until it becomes too hard,” she told The Denver Post in 1996.
But that fall, her body rejected the new lungs. Scott Ferris’ name went back on the long transplant waiting list. While she waited, she wrote “For Love of Life,” an autobiography that paid homage to organ donor Kristin Keilman, whose lungs Scott Ferris received in the first transplant operation.
She characterized the book as “my gift back” to the teenager, whose parents attended Scott Ferris’ wedding. Finishing the manuscript was her final goal. On March 3, 2001, she finished the last page when the phone rang. A new set of lungs was available. Hours later, Scott Ferris underwent the transplant that bought her another five years of life.
Originally offered both lungs, she chose only one, thinking of the next breathless patient on the waiting list.
“She always said it sounded like she was going through McDonald’s – did she want a single or a double?” said her mother.
Survivors include her husband, Kent Ferris of Lakewood; mother MaryJane Eddy-Scott of Lakewood; father James Scott of Sequim, Wash.; brother Sean Scott of Littleton; and sister Julianne Scott-Williams and nieces Paxtynn and Annika Williams, all of Stephens City, Va.
A memorial will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at Greenwood United Methodist Church, 12755 West Cedar Drive, Lakewood.
The family suggests memorial donations to Project C.U.R.E., Jeffco Action Center and local animal shelters.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
