KYLE — Cameron Dixon was selected to represent the American Liver Foundation (ALF) at the 2025 Boston Marathon as part of the Liver Life Challenge — ALF's official endurance program, where athletes nationwide raise funds to support the 100 million Americans affected by liver disease.
This comes after liver disease hit a little too close to home when, in 2023, Dixon — a recent Portland State University graduate and Division 1 soccer player —donated 70% of her liver to her mother, Jamie Lane, which ultimately saved her life.
Lane, a faculty member at Texas State University, battles polycystic liver and kidney disease, an ailment that is very prominent, at least in the kidneys, on her maternal side: her great grandmother had it; her grandmother died from it; her mother had a brain aneurysm, which is related to it, and she died when Lane was only 23; and her aunt, uncle and brother all had kidney transplants.
“However, I'm the first one to have polycystic liver disease, as well, so I always thought that I would need a kidney transplant,” Lane explained. “Probably about six or seven years ago, I started noticing some kind of bumps in my stomach and my abdomen was growing and it became harder and harder for me to bend over and breathe.”
The family lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, until they decided to move to Kyle, Texas, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, following Dixon’s high school graduation. It wasn’t until they moved to the area, where there is access to better, more advanced medical technology, that Lane was seeing more and more doctors to discover the issue.
“When I moved here, I started the process of seeing people who are more specifically looking at, well, I thought it was my kidneys and then, I kind of found out that it was my liver that was causing me most of the problems. So, I saw one kidney transplant doctor who I thought could help me with some of the issues that I was having with my liver and she said she couldn't. So, then I saw another doctor and, thankfully, he recommended me to go see … Dr. Kimberly Brown, who is a surgical oncologist at [The University of Texas at Austin.]”
Even though Dr. Brown is a surgical oncologist, she specialized in the liver and breasts, so she was the first person who agreed to do the first operation on Lane. She explained that she had “two gigantic grapefruit-sized cysts,” which basically means an individual has these cysts that grow on the kidneys and it impacts their function, however, that was happening on the liver for Lane.
“I had innumerable cysts around all over my liver, but the weird thing is that your liver still kind of works, so, like, it's really kind of challenging because I look pregnant,” Lane said. “When they did my transplant, it was 24 pounds and a normal liver is three pounds."
The surgery occurred in June 2022 and it was a success; however, Dr. Brown did warn Lane that it’s unknown how the body could react to abdominal surgery when the patient has polycystic liver disease. Following the surgery, Lane developed an umbilical hernia, which the doctor fixed later that year in December 2022, but that ultimately led to her liver failing.
“It's not her fault, it's just my body was not happy about it. So, I got really sick in January 2023 and I was in the hospital and, at that point, my body was just, I was getting ascites [and] fluid buildup in my abdominal cavity,” Lane said.
In March 2023, Lane realized that she was not getting better; when she was at the Texas Liver Institute, she was told that she was going to need a transplant at this point.
“The scary thing about the liver is that it's not like a kidney, where you can go on dialysis. If you go into liver failure, you don't have an option,” Lane said. “There's no bypass or anything like that.”
Then started the process of figuring out how she was going to get a transplant.
Based on a project done in college, Dixon believed that her blood type was B-positive, while her mom’s was A-positive, making her not a match to be a donor. However, she ended up taking an at-home blood test and it turned out that she was a perfect match.
“I did an online questionnaire for the hospital and then, I came down and had like 15 appointments in two days in San Antonio at the [University Health Transplant Institute], which consisted of things like blood draws, CAT scans with and without contrast, psychological exams and just a bunch of different things,” Dixon explained. “Two months later, so like mid-summer [I found out] that I was a match, but there's different things. You can have multiple matches, but only one person could be the donor. So like, my dad was going through the process, too, to see if he could be a match. I only knew that I was a match. I didn't know that I was the donor. And then, like, two weeks later, we found out that I was the donor and they set the surgery date for two weeks.”
When she found out that she needed a transplant, Lane put out a call on social media to see if anybody would be willing to do it — she broke the record of having more than 30 people stepping up, saying they could be her donor.
It was a bittersweet moment when Lane found out that her own daughter was going to be her donor.
“In March of 2023, I didn't realize I looked so sick. I mean, I was sick. I was going to get a paracentesis every week where they would drain the fluid out of my abdomen, sometimes up to 15 pounds of fluid, like that's how much would come in. It was awful. I was miserable,” the mother said. “She is one of the only D1 [collegiate] athletes to ever donate a major organ and return to play … Of course, she's like, ‘When do you think I can return to play?’ No one could really tell her. That was really hard for me. Since she was 4 years old, she's played soccer and the thought of — because of me — her not being able to finish out her college soccer career was devastating. That was really hard, but obviously she didn't give me a choice and, at that point, I needed this to happen.”
The transplant occurred on July 27, 2023.
While the surgery and recovery did keep Dixon out of her season in 2023, she returned to the field in March 2024, Lane shared.
“It's honestly been quite the ride, but my coaches have honestly been like my rocks in Portland and they've met my mom multiple times, like they love her. So, for me to possibly do this, there was no doubt in their mind, my athletic facility actually financially, made it possible for me to come back for the kidney transplant. They're like, 'If you need a rental car, need a hotel room, if you need cash daily or for food, just let us know.' So, they paid for my [plane] tickets, actually, which is really helpful,” Dixon said.
She added that after a couple of conversations with her surgeons, they said that she would be back on the soccer field in nine to 12 months, but her dad, who is an ultra marathon runner and very competitive, said that she could do it in six. Dixon ended up being ready to play again in three months.
“The coaches knew that I was gonna be out the whole season, so even when I was like, ‘I'm fully cleared,’ they're like, ‘That's awesome, but no,’ which honestly, I appreciated it because as much as I wanted to get back on the field, the thought of a ball hitting my scar or an elbow or something made me want to throw up,” she said. “Sometimes, if I'm sitting on a plane for too long, I have to stretch it a little bit … My labs have been nothing but perfect the further that we've gotten away from the transplant date, but if I have a really hard workout or something like that, I can actually feel my liver. It’s sore. It’s kind of weird.”
Dixon is gearing up to run in the upcoming Boston Marathon, to take place April 21, 2025, which is an extension of what she has already been doing: using her platform of being a collegiate athlete to spread awareness of liver disease.
“I just have a very competitive mindset and with my dad being an old term runner, I knew that I wanted to kind of get into that after soccer. There's a bunch of different things, like organizations, involved in the transplant world. So, in Portland, I was involved in a couple and I just remember, last spring, I was on Instagram and I saw one of the organizations posting pictures of runners representing them, having the American Liver Foundation across their chest. I was like, ‘Huh, I wonder what that is,’” Dixon said. “When soccer was really starting to come to an end, I did some more research and realized that the American Liver Foundation actually has teams that run all the main marathons, like Chicago, Boston and New York, all those marathons and they got to represent them. I just thought that would be really cool to kind of put two and two together. I knew that I wanted to run and now, I can continue to spread awareness and use my platform to basically show people that, although you can have a heart on your driver's license, which is an amazing first step, people just really don't know about liver donation.”
Lane’s story continued from there because she was double listed for both her kidney and liver at the same time because she was already in total kidney failure, but they were still hanging on enough to where she wanted to wait until after she received the liver transplant. She explained that people are really sick when they get their transplants, but they still have to be healthy enough to withstand the long surgery, which for the liver, takes about 10-12 hours.
Within three months of getting her liver transplant, Lane’s kidneys started to go down because she also got COVID during that time. While she was hoping that her husband was going to be able to do the kidney transplant, he was unable to, due to having kidney stones in both of his kidneys.
Surprisingly enough, Lane was fortunate that another person who had actually come forward for the liver came forward for the kidney and so, she has two living donors.
For those who may be undergoing being a recipient or donor for a transplant surgery, Dixon shared while trusting the doctors, surgeons and process are important, it’s also good to know when it’s okay to be scared and ask questions because that is what the medical professionals are there for, as well as having a support system there.
“She's really advocating for the most important thing for people to understand what being an organ donor versus a living organ donor [is]. People don't understand that that's something that you can do to save people's lives,” Lane said. “There are people who don’t even have someone [they know] to donate to. They just want to donate and do that for people. So, it's pretty incredible that there are people out there that do that. That's kind of what I think the most important thing is for her to get the word out for that.”
More information about the American Liver Foundation can be found at www.liverfoundation.org.
