Go Fund Me
Brisbane-based beauty salon owner Nardya Miller, 25, is using her last days to achieve two incredibly important goals: one, to raise awareness of organ donation and two, to ensure she doesn’t leave her fiancé with debts.
Ms Miller has been given just one week to live after her body continually rejected a double lung transplant she had over two years ago. “Cystic fibrosis was a part of her life for 23 years and got her to needing a bilateral lung transplant,” her fiancé, Liam Fitzgerald, explained to the Sunshine Coast Daily.
“But after the first 11 months post surgery, being so perfect, the lungs started to fail, over and over again requiring treatments she never thought she would have to go through.”
“She went through rounds of plasmapheresis to try to stop donor-specific antibodies, but nothing worked.”
In the interview, Mr Fitzgerald stresses the vital importance of organ donation. “The only way people will ever have a second chance at life is to be an organ donor,” he says.
Before she was admitted to palliative care last week, Ms Miller had bought a house with Mr Fitzgerald and opened her own beauty salon.
“She didn’t want to stop working as she didn’t want to burden her fiancé with debt,” Ms Miller’s cousin, Tachae Douglas-Miller, says on a Go Fund Me page she has set up to make Ms Miller’s dream of not leaving her fiancé in debt a reality.
At time of writing $26,095 had been raised by 878 people in seven days – above and beyond the family’s initial $10k target.
“We are overwhelmed with the generosity from you all!” Douglas-Miller has posted.
Ms Miller has charted her experience on social media and posted the below after being admitted to palliative care.
“Things do not always turn out how you plan in life, there are some really huge things that I will never have, places I’ll never go and things I’ll never live to see,” she writes.
“All I wish is to be remembered as the girl who brightened your day at least once. And please I beg you to live your life to absolute fullest.”
