‘I’ve already had my miracle’: 26-year-old Georgia mom enters hospice care with only weeks to live

By Savannah Younger

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    SAVANNAH, Georgia (WJCL) — As the holiday season begins, Sara Long, a 26-year-old Savannah woman, is entering hospice care after a prolonged battle with kidney failure.

Now the wife and mother is preparing to say her final goodbyes to family and friends.

“I wanted to make sure that everything’s kind of ready to go for when family visits and all that kind of stuff,” Long said. “So, I just want to make things as easy as possible for everybody.”

Long has been told she has two to three weeks left to live and is now preparing her family for her passing.

“We were expecting to have more time, you know,” she said. “I was just hoping to make it through the holidays, honestly.”

Long was diagnosed with a rare kidney disease at 13 years old.

“I had a rash of bruises along my legs. And, that was very painful. I mean, it got to the place where I could hardly walk some days, and it was just miserable,” she said.

Six years later, her mother donated a kidney to her. But the new organ failed.

“It had a lot of issues,” Long said. “I’ll just say that. So I went into rejection multiple times, even though I was compliant with my medication.”

Long thought she would get another chance at life when her best friend volunteered to donate a kidney. However, after multiple tests, her friend was diagnosed with lupus, making her an unsuitable donor.

“They just don’t feel like I would be able to do a transplant without dying from sepsis,” Long said.

Despite her challenges, Long remains grateful for life.

“Realistically, if I had not received the care that I had received, I would have died when I was 13,” she said.

For nearly a decade, Long’s husband, Justin, has been by her side.

“Seven long years of battling all this, and she’s…I think she’s ready, unfortunately,” said Justin Long.

“I just love her very much. I tried my best for seven years and you had a good fight, baby. She lived longer than she was supposed to,” he added.

“By a long shot. By a very long shot,” Sara Long responded.

Their daughter, Riley, 4, is too young to understand what is happening, but Long is creating a hope chest so Riley can always remember her.

“There are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of letters at this point, to open at different various points in her life. So, like her first day of school all through, or a graduate degree, potentially,” Long said.

“Mommy, are you going up to the sky?” Riley Long asked.

“I’m going up to the sky,” Sara responded.

“That’s right baby, she’s going to become a star,” Justin Long added.

“Yeah. You can look up to the stars when you see me,” Sara said.

“I feel like I’ve already had my miracle,” Sara said. “I feel like Riley is my miracle. And getting to spend these years that I’ve had with her is my miracle, because it has put in so much work and so much effort into making sure that I stay alive and saving my life time and time again.”

“I would rather have 26 really good years full of adventure and full of meaning and full of love and just the most beautiful people and I’m so glad that I got that instead of 100 mediocre ones,” she added.

Sara Long’s family has created a GoFundMe for her funeral expenses.

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