April 9, 2001

Benefit to help fight difficult disease

Paula Blonski

When Mary Monaghen had surgery in May 1998, her family never expected she would die three months later.

The surgery went well, but the Streamwood woman developed acute respiratory distress syndrome, a sudden lung failure from which she never recovered.

There seemed to be very little available information about the syndrome at the time, and that was a major frustration for her family.

As the third anniversary of Monaghen's death draws closer, sister Paula Blonski is trying to increase public awareness of the illness and raise money for research.

Blonski is vice president of the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome Foundation of Illinois.

The illness is difficult to diagnose and treat, according to Blonski's research. An estimated 40 percent of the 150,000 people who develop it each year in the United States die.

Monaghen had a high fever, her white blood cell count was low and she had difficulty breathing, Blonski said. She developed ARDS after surgery, said her sister, who lives in Streamwood.

"It's a sudden onset," Blonski said.

One purpose of the foundation is publicity.

"Our hope is to get awareness out there so people can understand what this is," Blonski said.

"We'd never heard of it before. "When she (her sister) was going through it, nobody could tell us what it was. It was sad. No literature; nothing to help us out. We were totally dumbfounded."

Tickets for an upcoming fund-raiser in Chicago, on Monaghen's birthday, June 19, are sold out. But the foundation continues to accept donations. The money raised will go toward research, education and awareness of the illness.

The foundation hopes to start a registry of survivors on its Web site: http://www.ardsil.com.

Eileen Zacharias

Survivor Eileen Zacharias of Chicago is the foundation's president. She became ill in the summer of 1995, at age 33.

She had lower back pain, and it soon became difficult to breathe. She developed other health problems, and doctors did not seem to know what was wrong.

"They had never heard of it," Zacharias said.

Blonski said the lack of awareness of the illness is frustrating. "That was the hard part, not having any information and not knowing what's going on," she said.

Zacharias went to the hospital on a Friday. By Sunday, she went into respiratory arrest and was placed in a drug-induced coma for four weeks.

"About two weeks in, doctors told my family I'd probably not survive," Zacharias said.

But then, her health slowly improved, and today she is a mother of two.

"I'm a success story. There are people who are survivors ... and have chronic problems," she said.

Zacharias said she hopes that by having a registry of survivors, researchers would have a more readily available pool of people to test in their efforts to find a cause and cure. She doesn't know of any widespread testing now.

"Maybe there's some testing they can do on survivors to see if there's a propensity for me to have gotten this," Zacharias said. "There is no cure, no prevention. You just ride the storm."

Zacharias and Blonski met over the Internet after they went looking for answers about the illness.

Both said it is important to help other families affected by the disease.

"We want people to know we're here and that we want to help if we can. I can take my knowledge ... and tell somebody else what to expect," Zacharias said. "Your life is forever changed and that's something as a survivor is a hard pill to swallow."

ARDS Foundation
3100 Dundee Road, Suite 402
Northbrook, IL 60062
PH: 312-749-7047

Eileen Rubin Zacharias, President
Paula Blonski, Vice President

The ARDS Foundation

All donations are tax deductible in the amount allowed by the law. The ARDS Foundation is a federal 501(c)(3) organization.

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