{"id":13885,"date":"2010-05-03T08:32:43","date_gmt":"2010-05-03T12:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=13885"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:42:34","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:42:34","slug":"class-of-2010-erica-stein-college-of-liberal-arts-and-sciences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2010\/05\/class-of-2010-erica-stein-college-of-liberal-arts-and-sciences\/","title":{"rendered":"Class of 2010: Erica Stein, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Erica<\/a>
Erica Stein. Photo courtesy of Erica Stein<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Erica Stein, CLAS<\/a> \u201910, had a life-saving liver transplant the summer after her freshman year at UConn. It gave the communications major a new academic focus \u2013 on health communications \u2013 and a desire to direct her career toward helping other organ recipients and donor families.<\/p>\n

She has interned for Life Choice Donor Services in Windsor, Conn., and founded Donate Life UConn during her sophomore year, to raise awareness about the importance of organ and tissue donation. The group now has 200 members \u2013 not all at UConn \u2013 and a Facebook group.<\/p>\n

Stein\u2019s own experience with a transplant was terrifyingly swift. In two days, the healthy 19-year-old went from having a stomachache to passing out and experiencing jaundice and a distended belly. A native of south New Jersey, she was taken by helicopter to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and diagnosed with liver failure due to Wilson\u2019s Disease, a rare genetic disorder.<\/p>\n

Her parents were on an anniversary trip to China, but they rushed home to be with her. (Her father, Mark Stein, is a 1972 graduate of the School of Business). In just 24 hours over a Fourth of July holiday, a donor liver was found. Stein got her transplant, and woke up not even fully realizing what had happened.<\/p>\n

She went home two and a half weeks later after additional bile duct reconstruction surgery, and by Aug. 22, move-in day at UConn, she was ready to come back to school. But she had a rejection episode, not uncommon in transplant recipients. \u201c[It was] one of my worst days ever,\u201d she recalls. And she had to take the entire semester off.<\/p>\n

Her professors at UConn let her study online, and work from the hospital and from home in the interim.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were so accommodating \u2013 it was unbelievable,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

That level of concern from faculty, the Center for Students with Disabilities<\/a>, and Student Health Services<\/a>, was one of the reasons her younger brother now wants to come to UConn, she says.<\/p>\n

In her junior year, Stein studied abroad<\/a> in Florence, Italy. She lives off campus with four sisters from the Kappa Kappa Gamma<\/a> sorority. But the defining time in her four years will be the summer that she lost and recovered her health, thanks to the gift of an organ from a donor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A life-saving liver transplant gave Erica Stein a new academic focus on health communications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[43],"class_list":["post-13885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-05 04:00:37","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13885"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37497,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13885\/revisions\/37497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13885"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=13885"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=13885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}