By Steve Hummer

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Leanne Lee and her amazing liver go on another run this morning, a little 13-mile out-and-back from Centennial Olympic Park.

Running is her latest symptom since the transplant. First, there was a clear-eyed glow that replaced the constant sickly yellow. Then, as if a switch flipped on, her energy surged. And now, a runner’s high is kicking depression’s saggy butt.

She can’t seem to get enough of this running thing. Four weeks ago, Lee, 33, finished her first full-blown marathon in Jacksonville. Two weeks ago, she did a Disney 13-miler. Today, she is in the half-marathon portion of the ING Georgia Marathon, one among nearly 16,000 runners.

“Now I’ve got all this energy, I’m like, ‘OK, what can I do next?’ ” she said.

“While I feel as good as I do, I want to do all these things I wasn’t able to do in my 20s because I was spending so much time just getting through my day-to-day life. Now I feel like I got back some of those years that I didn’t take advantage of before.”

Born with a liver condition that disrupted the function of the organ’s bile-producing ducts, Lee still enjoyed relative good health throughout her childhood in Gwinnett County. With the help of some stop-gap corrective surgery when she was an infant, she was able to nurse along her original equipment into her college years at Georgia Tech.

But soon after Lee graduated, beginning her married life and her teaching career at Atlanta’s Holy Spirit Preparatory School, her health began to turn.

To see her now, energized and active, a super speeder when she speaks, it is difficult to imagine how difficult her sickly years were. Just getting through a workday was her marathon, she said. Her trips to the hospital became more frequent and more serious — at one point, her body went into shock because of the buildup of toxins.

‘A miracle type thing’

Lee waited more than two years on the liver transplant list before the call finally came on the morning of Oct. 27, 2006, as she drove to work. By that afternoon, doctors at Piedmont Hospital were trading out her failing liver with one from a recently deceased donor. Consummate teacher that she is, Lee asked the nurse to take photos of her old and new livers, so that she might share them with her anatomy class.

Just hours after the surgery, she awoke, looked in a mirror and noticed something wonderful: “My eyes were white and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I don’t remember a time when they didn’t have that [jaundiced] tinge to them.”

The differences in her life were more profound than any superficial changes in coloration. Gradually, as she gained more and more confidence in her body, Lee returned to the gym and resumed working out. Meanwhile, she constantly reconfigured her limits.

“It is a living miracle type thing,” said Lee’s primary doctor, Raymond Rubin, a gastroenterologist/hepatologist. “People get this surgery, it’s an eye-opening experience. A light bulb goes off and they decide, ‘I can do almost anything.’ ”

So, in the summer of last year, when a friend suggested they sign up together for Jeff Galloway’s local training program and aim for a marathon, Lee said sure.

A six-hour marathon

Medically, there was no reason not to stretch herself. Rubin encouraged his patient to hit the road, cautioning her only not to drop too much weight in the process (she would shed 25 pounds over the course of her training).

The first year after a transplant is the riskiest period, the doctor said, the time when the chance of rejection of the new organ is the greatest. “After that hurdle is cleared,” he assured, “the sky is pretty much the limit.”

Other non-medical doubts arose at key junctures in the making of a marathoner. Like during the first training session with the Galloway group, when going just two miles seemed like a trek up Everest. Or in the midst of early morning runs during a particularly brutal Southern winter, when Lee and her running partner Amy Caldwell chugged along the quiet streets, their breaths given shape in frosty plumes, each questioning her sanity with every footfall.

But the two of them made it through to the big day in Jacksonville last month, clasping hands at the finish of a 26.2-mile run, just under six hours after they began. They cried and hugged and were filled to the brim with a sense of accomplishment.

‘Part of my life now’

Doing that marathon had been something of a bucket-list dare, but in preparing for it, Lee discovered a more substantial relationship with running.

Running has “become something I don’t want to give up,” she said. Her calendar includes 
races later this year in Anaheim, Calif., and Chicago as well as around the Atlanta area. The Galloway method stresses finishing the race over being a slave to time — but Lee admits that she wants to get faster now.

“How long I’ll keep on doing it, who knows? It has become a part of my life now.”

She runs because she can. It is her way of expressing a hard-won vitality, another method of living a life rather than simply enduring it.

Yes, running is a symptom, a sign that the transplant has gifted her with her best days, and she plans to wring every one of them dry.

The contrast between the Lee of today and her pre-transplant self is stunning to those who have witnessed the change.

“What a tremendous difference — night and day,” said her husband, Brad.

Said her running partner, Caldwell: “She is a lot more committed to life and friendship and everything. She has all this new confidence. [At her sickest] she always was kind of assuming bad things were going to happen to her.”

Not any more.

“I’ve come from that negative, bad place where I was always down to now, where I feel if I can [finish a long run], I can do anything,” Lee said.

Sunday’s marathon

Race time: Wheelchair, 
6:55 a.m.; half-marathon and marathon, 7 a.m.

Starts: Centennial Olympic Park

Meet Leanne Lee

Age: 33

Place of birth: Huntsville, Ala.; family moved to Snellville while she was in elementary school

High school: Brookwood

College: Georgia Tech; master’s degree from Georgia State

Residence: Duluth

Profession: Biology and anatomy teacher, Holy Spirit Preparatory School, Atlanta, eight years

Family: Husband Brad, no children