SAN ANTONIO – For 12 years, Rebecca Taylor has been fighting for her life every day because of pediatric pancreatitis.
There is no cure for the painful disease. She has been on a feeding tube most of her life, has had her pancreas removed and is at extremely high risk when it comes to any infection or other illness.
”I have had 120 surgeries and procedures, seven-and-a-half organs missing that have been removed and over 1,300 days in a hospital, checked into a hospital,” 19-year-old Taylor said.
For the last couple of weeks, Taylor has been in the hospital fighting an infection. Right before talking to KSAT, she had just received special permission from her doctors to leave the hospital and to do at-home hospital treatment.
All of this so she could go back to College Station to finish out her freshman year at Texas A&M University.
To say she is tough is an understatement.
“I’m just so happy to be at school right now,” Taylor said. “That’s all I can think about and I’m going to continue to just choose to focus on that.”
She is majoring in biomedical engineering and hopes to go to medical school to find a cure for the disease that has plagued her.
But more importantly, her motivation is to help cure the thousands of other children who suffer from it.
“If I can’t help myself, I can at least help hundreds of other kids through this, and that’s what’s kept me going and happy to be who I am,” she said.
It’s why in 2017 with the help of the Make a Wish Foundation, she held a gala fundraiser. That fundraiser has turned into a full-blown nonprofit, Rebecca’s Wish, that has raised more than $2 million.
“We are doing research, we’re helping with the National Pancreas Foundation and Mission Care to try to get the first drug targeted therapies for the pancreas,” Christyn Taylor, Rebecca’s mother and president of Rebecca’s Wish said.
Christyn Taylor said they also use this nonprofit to help other families who don’t have the financial means to see the needed specialists or spend weeks on end in the hospital.
”We had a child that their family had to sell their one family car because the child was in the hospital for over 100 days and of the lost wages, and they couldn’t afford that,” she said. “So we come in to help them get in the door.”
As hard as it is for Christyn Taylor to see her daughter in constant physical pain and at times be apart from her other two sons and husband while caring for Rebecca in the hospital, she too remains resilient.
She said she knows the work from Rebecca’s Wish will help thousands of other families fight pediatric pancreatitis.
“Seeing that their lives don’t have to be what ours was 12 years ago makes us beyond happy, and it lets us know that there’s a purpose that we have in this pain,” she said.
And you can help out Rebecca’s Wish by attending its second Wild for Wishes event. It’s happening Saturday, April 30 at the San Antonio Zoo from 6-11 p.m.
You’ll not only enjoy rare animal encounters, fun treats and live music but also meet and support the pancreatitis patients and their families sponsored by the nonprofit. You can participate in feeding the giraffes, play tug of war with lions and dance under the stars. It costs $80 for adults 21 and up, $40 for kids and teens, and children under 5 are free. Support a child with pancreatitis so they can attend the event for $80. The attire is “zoo party fun.”
For more information, click here.