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Love sustains couple through medical ordeals

5 min read
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Courtesy of Lauren and Justin Pass

Lauren and Justin Pass of North Versailles appear in a photo taken for their 2013 wedding.

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Gideon Bradshaw

Lauren and Justin Pass pose together at a coffee shop last week.

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Gideon Bradshaw/Observer-Reporter

Lauren and Justin Pass sit at a coffee shop where they were interviewed last week.

Lauren and Justin Pass met online in late 2010 and felt a connection over messages.

“We just kind of started talking at first,” Lauren recalled. “We didn’t just sit there and say, ‘Let’s go out,’ or anything. We kind of talked and got to know each other before we actually went out.”

It was almost a month before they had their first date at Rock Bottom in Homestead and went to the overlook on Mt. Washington where they could see the vista of Pittsburgh’s lights sprawling below them.

One thing they had in common was that both had already beaten cancer while in their 20s. Still, no medical practitioner told them what would befall them in the coming years, and probably couldn’t have.

The couple married in 2013. They live in North Versailles.

Justin, 34, now receives dialysis three times a week because of kidney failure in 2018. Lauren, 36, needs regular treatment for neuromyelitis optica, a disease of the spinal cord and optic nerve she learned she had in 2016, “when I was hospitalized due to my body pretty much attacking itself,” she said.

“You go from basically having a normal life to wondering what’s going to happen the next day,” Justin said. “There’s a chance anybody could go out, be in a car crash and die. We both have something, sicknesses, that we know can kill us at any time. She can wake up paralyzed,” Justin said.

“Because of the NMO,” Lauren added to his thought.

“It’s just something that’s always in the back of your head,” Justin finished.

Lauren grew up in the Mon Valley, but was living in North Versailles when they met on Plenty of Fish. Her late grandparents, Gale and Oliver West, who lived in Charleroi, were featured in a previous installment of this series.

Justin grew up in Export, a tiny borough in Westmoreland County.

He’d been in remission from Hodgkin lymphoma for several years when they met. Earlier in 2010, Lauren had been diagnosed with and treated successfully for cervical cancer. But in 2012 – the same year Justin proposed during a date that repeated the first – Lauren found out she had lupus.

Neither ailment stopped them from moving forward with their lives together. They were married in Latrobe, and had their reception at a fire hall in Scottdate.

Justin was told at first that the new illness wouldn’t lead to kidney failure. Steroids and diuretics were prescribed.

“So I did that for a little over five years,” Justin said. “Then in February of 2018, I went into kidney failure.” He also had a “huge lung infection” that left a hole in his right lung.

He said physicians aren’t exactly sure what happened, but believe the steroids may have weakened his immune system.

Justin wound up spending two months at UPMC East in Monroeville, and a third at an inpatient rehabilitation center in Harmarville, north of Pittsburgh. As he fought illness on multiple fronts, he lost his job as a transportation manager for a shredding company.

“We got a letter in the mail one Friday. It was actually the day after my birthday. It’s just like, ‘We’ve terminated your position,’ and that was about it.”

They were on Justin’s insurance plan, so the premiums shot up to $1,100 per month to remain on it through COBRA until they switched over to Lauren’s when the year was up.

Lauren, an administrative accounting manager at three of First Transit’s locations – including Freedom Transit in Washington County – supported Justin and kept up with her job while caring for their three dogs.

One night that spring, Lauren was driving home on Route 48 from celebrating her father’s birthday. A drunken driver careened onto an embankment and then rammed into her car.

“It was a bad day. These are the things that, my mom tells me, ‘How do you not cry?'” Lauren said. She added with a gentle laugh: “What are you going to do?”

The accident gave her a concussion and sent her to the hospital. She needed extensive rehabilitative therapy.

Meanwhile, Justin needed time to recover, too. In the hospital, he’d been too weak to sit up in bed. By the time he was discharged from inpatient rehab, he was strong enough to sit in a wheelchair.

“But after that – probably for a good six or seven months – she had to help me with silly stuff, just like getting up off the chair at home to get to the kitchen,” he said.

He can walk now, but uses a wheelchair for longer distances. He’s self-employed, selling pet supplies online.

Support from their family and community has mitigated some of their ordeal.

Lauren’s mother, Barb Moore West, held a benefit dinner in June. Some good friends set up a nonprofit, Friends Helping Friends of Western PA, to raise donations, too. Lauren said she was surprised by support they’ve received even from strangers, like people her mother knows from her job at an insurance company.

But the main source of their strength lies elsewhere.

“We don’t give up on each other,” Lauren said. “We definitely have our days, everybody does. But it’s definitely one of those things where we just don’t throw in the towel.”

“A lot of this stuff just brought us closer together,” Justin added. “There’s a lot of times you take for granted the things you have with somebody, and then, when something happens, we’ll sit down and (say), ‘You know what? We need to just spend more time not on our phones and just talk.'”

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