Woman needs 4 organs to survive

Molly Pearce has had what her mother dryly calls "a very alternative life" since birth because of her chronic health issues.

The 24-year-old Santa Monica, California, woman has Hirschsprung's disease, a rare congenital disorder that obstructs the large intestine due to an absence of nerve cells that regulate muscle movement.

She never attended public school full time, has been in and out of hospitals since she was a newborn, and discovered that the one thing she can eat without getting sick is a bag of Cheetos.

Now, Pearce needs four organs -- a liver, kidney, pancreas and small intestine -- from a deceased type O donor to live.

"It's a pretty unusual circumstance," said Dr. Alan Langnas, chief of transplantation at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where Pearce is being treated. "Fortunately, she's young, and youth trumps everything. She's in very good shape relative to her condition."

At birth, Pearce was one of only three people in the world with her particular type of disease, and doctors predicted she wouldn't live beyond her first year.

Growing up, "I would go to school when I could, but I didn't know anybody and always felt left out," Pearce said. "Most of the time I felt OK, but I was really in a fragile state. I just wanted to be a normal kid."

Why I donated my bone marrow

Pearce managed her disease as well as possible but experienced a major setback at 12 when she was given a drug too powerful for someone of her size. It destroyed her small intestine and her kidney, forcing her onto a liquid diet. It wasn't until she was 17 that she received a small intestine transplant, and at 18 she accepted one of her mother's kidneys.

Kidney stones: 'Worse than childbirth'

How do you diagnose kidney stones?

One of the most common presentations is the flank pain on one side. It sometimes radiates down into the stomach, and it can actually radiate down into the genital area. That type of pain is pretty commonly seen in stone patients.

Sometimes there's nausea and vomiting. Those type of symptoms are something that gives us a clue that this may be a stone.

The CAT scan is the gold standard for imaging for kidney stones. That's usually the way to diagnose it. You can't do it from a blood test or anything else.

Why do people say that they are so painful?

What it does is, it blocks the flow of urine in the kidney, and it causes backup. And it's an excruciating pain. A lot of people do describe it as worse than childbirth.

When the system is trying to push urine out, what happens is: your kidney and your ureter -- they have this muscle propagation that goes down the kidney into the ureter -- when it's trying to push and the stone is blocking it, you get these intense pains. That's why we call it colicky, it comes and goes and it's extremely painful and the main reason for the pain is the backup of urine.