Ohio woman thanks lawyer for saving her life 36 years ago
By Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY Updated 2012-03-27 9:29 AM
Florida attorney Joel Cohen says the e-mail he recently got from Carolynn Ivey "raised the hair on my neck." The last time she was a part of Cohen's life, Carolynn Ivey weighed less than 2 pounds and desperately needed a lifesaving blood transfusion despite the religious objections of her parents.
Cohen, then a young Pensacola attorney, was tapped by the Escambia County Circuit Court to become temporary guardian to give legal consent for the transfusions for Carolynn and her twin sister, Julia, the Pensacola News Journal reports
Although Cohen never saw the girls or spoke to the parents, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the case, rushing off to Tallahassee for critical appeals court documents and hurrying back that evening so that the doctors could get to work.
"Once I saw the gravity of the situation, I jumped in with both feet," Cohen says.
Carolynn Ivey Evans, now a 36-year-old shipping clerk in Ohio, survived, but her weaker sister did not.
Ivey Evans, who has four children, three stepchildren and three step-grandchildren, tells the News Journal that she found out about her case over the Internet and wanted to thank Cohen "for saving my life."
"If it was not for Mr. Cohen fighting for me, I would not be here today! It brought me to tears that he would try so hard," she tells the newspaper.
Ivey Evans says her mother left the Jehovah's Witnesses faith a year after she was born, and her father later went to prison, where he died in 1995.
"My relationship with my mother is great," she says, "Though this is something that we have not really discussed. I don't want to upset her."
Ivey Evans tells the News Journal she donated her children's cord blood at birth and hopes that a child's life might have been saved.
"If one of my children were in need, I would not think twice about getting the help they need to survive and get the fighting chance I have been given," she says.