A lucky liver, & now her big day

By Paul H.B. Shin

October 15, 2005

Daily News Staff Writer

A Manhattan bride-to-be who received a lifesaving liver transplant just days from certain death will be taking her wedding vows today, just two months after her ordeal.

Shari Kurzrok, 31, who made headlines after her family and friends' controversial public appeal for an organ, got a donated liver in early August through the standard organ-allocation system.

"We're all so thankful that we're able to go through with it as planned and have something to really celebrate after everything we've been through," she said yesterday.

"It's surreal. It's definitely incredible," added Kurzrok, an executive at Ogilvy Public Relations who has organized many health campaigns.

Her fiancé, Robby Schnall, said the wedding, which has been in the works since he proposed last November, has taken on special meaning because of her brush with death from a rare condition called Wilson's disease.

"It's going to be an amazing celebration," said Schnall, 36, a marketing executive at Cole Haan. "What we went through proved to each other what we mean to each other and what's important in life."

Kurzrok's surgeon, Dr. Lewis Teperman, director of transplantation at NYU Medical Center, said she is lucky to be alive.

"She had been in a coma, her liver had failed and her kidneys had failed," Teperman said. "She was going to die without a liver transplant."

Schnall said the ordeal was "an emotional roller coaster because you didn't know what was going to happen."

After the family's desperate public campaign, a match luckily was found through the United Network for Organ Sharing, an agency that coordinates transplants. And because Kurzrok's case was so acute, she was bumped up to the top of the list of potential recipients.

"She was most fortunate that one [a match] came along," said Teperman, who has given Kurzrok a clean bill of health and has been invited to today's wedding in Woodbury, L.I. "She can go on and have a healthy family, and live a long and happy life."

"I can't begin to tell you how wonderful it is for nurses and physicians to see someone that we cared for in the intensive care unit now getting married," he said.

Copyright © 2005 Daily News LP.

This article posted October 29, 2005.