‘Angels in the Sky’: Charity Flies 9-Year-Old to Pittsburgh for Kidney Transplant

Feb. 2—Jailyn Mason and UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh had been in this situation before.

There was a kidney available for 9-year-old Jailyn, who also needs a small bowel transplant. To get the transplant, Jailyn had to travel to Pittsburgh from her home in Texas within a matter of hours — too fast to arrange flights on a commercial airline.

On at least three other occasions, Jailyn had missed out on the transplant due to transportation issues. This time, however, there was "an angel in the sky," as Jailyn's mom, Dyshica Bradley, puts it.

good flight

Jailyn was born with gastroschisis, a condition in which a hole in the abdominal wall near the belly button enables a baby's intestines to grow outside the body. Attempts to fix it when Jailyn was an infant were unsuccessful, leaving her without a functioning intestinal system and completely dependent on IV nutrition.

UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh is one of just a handful of hospitals nationwide that will do a pediatric small bowel transplant, and even though Jailyn was born and raised in Texas, the hospital has been involved in her care since she was a toddler. As Jailyn's kidneys worsened, her medical team decided that she wouldn't be able to handle a small bowel transplant without a new kidney first.

Throughout her early life, Jailyn was repeatedly abandoned in hospitals for weeks at a time and ended up in foster care at age 3. Bradley, who did foster care for medically complicated children and has adopted four other special-needs children, took her in and adopted her about four years ago.

Of all the hurdles in Jailyn's young life, the toughest has been getting from her home near Houston to Pittsburgh for the transplant.

The hospital generally gives patients about six hours to get there from the time that an organ becomes available. Jailyn was given a little more time because she was coming from Texas, but the distance and her medical needs made that impossible on a commercial airline. Jailyn's mother bought flight insurance, only to find out after paying premiums for years that the flight wouldn't be covered.

"I spent two weeks crying," she said. "I didn't get this little girl this far to say we don't have a plan to get her from one place to another to save her life."

UPMC Children's Hospital didn't have much luck, either. And without a plan for transportation, they weren't sure whether she should remain on the transplant waiting list.

"I probably had 20 phone calls with Medicaid trying to get them to pay for the flight," said Dawn Wilkerson, the hospital's transplant administrator. "I was hitting my head against the wall."

"Desperate is an understatement," added Louisa Muniain, an intestinal care and transplant social worker. "I was like, 'I literally don't know who else I can ask.'"

After months of frustration, Muniain's social work manager got an email with the name of an organization she'd never heard of: AeroAngel, based in Denver, which flies seriously ill children on private jets to receive medical care.

Although the nonprofit had never done such a time-sensitive transplant flight, it agreed to try to help.

Mark Pestal, a lawyer and pilot, founded AeroAngel in 2010 after serving on the board of another aviation charity and seeing the unmet need of private flights for seriously ill children. Some of the children have virtually no immune system and can't be exposed to crowds on commercial planes. Others require so much medical equipment that commercial travel isn't feasible.

Last year, AeroAngel flew 50 children for medical care. "We could probably double that with more resources," said Pestal.

The charity relies on a network of jet donors and volunteer professional pilots. In Jailyn's case, Pestal was able to line up a jet donor in Pittsburgh who prefers to remain anonymous.

On the night of Dec. 17, Bradley was throwing a Christmas party at home for her family. Pestal was also at a holiday party. Muniain and Wilkerson were at their respective homes in their pajamas.

The call came at 9 p.m. that a kidney was available for Jailyn. By 9:08, Wilkerson had texted AeroAngel. By 11 p.m., the flight itinerary was set and by 1:15 p.m. the next day, Jailyn had landed in Pittsburgh.

After hours of testing to make sure she was a good candidate for the transplant, Jailyn got the kidney on Dec. 18.

Jailyn stayed at UPMC Children's for more than a month, recovering well from the transplant with some medical ups and downs.

"She's the cutest little kid," said Wilkerson. "She loves TikTok — she's just a normal girl. She just happens to have these unfortunate and chronic medical issues, but you would never know talking to her. She's just trying to live her best life."

When Jailyn is feeling well, she dances in pajamas and magenta monster slippers or zooms around the nurses station, pushed in an orange ride-on car. She watches cooking videos because even though she doesn't eat food by mouth, cooking is her favorite hobby. She loves music, too, and has been singing along to songs by R&B singer Kelly Price.

"We've had an ongoing laugh since the transplant that the donor could have been an old soul," said her mom.

She was discharged from Children's Hospital on Jan. 27, and AeroAngel was able to fly her back home. She needs to avoid crowds for six months post-transplant because of her suppressed immune system, so commercial travel would have been difficult.

After she heals from the kidney transplant, her mother hopes she will be re-listed for the small bowel transplant.

And the transplant staff at Children's is already working with AeroAngel again, with plans to get a boy in need of a liver transplant to Pittsburgh from Minneapolis.

"They are actually angels in the sky," said Bradley. "They came out of nowhere."

Anya Sostek: [email protected].

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