After more than a week in the hospital, Kelsi-Rae Moreshead is home, new kidney and all.

The 14-year-old, who was featured in the Sun Journal this week, has battled a progressive kidney disease since she was 6. For years, she has had to take dozens of pills and stick to a restrictive diet that meant no sodium, no potassium, very few liquids. She has had to endure daily dialysis to sweep her bloodstream clear of the toxins.

The past six months were among the hardest, forcing Kelsi-Rae to battle back from a searing, near-fatal infection. Doctors warned that her body probably couldn’t handle another medical crisis. For four months, she hovered at the top of the transplant list.

Then, in the wee hours of a humid, mid-July night, the phone rang. A local child had died and the parents agreed to organ donation. The kidney matched Kelsi-Rae.

The surgery lasted three and a half hours.

On Monday, more than a week after “the call,” Kelsi-Rae went home.

She still must take a lot of pills, including steroids and anti-rejection medication. She must go to the hospital twice a week for blood tests and she must track her health stats every day from home.

It could take up to a year before doctors know whether her body will reject the transplanted kidney or whether her disease will ravage the new organ like it did the old.

But she’s feeling well. Dialysis is gone. She can eat and drink anything she wants.

Said her mother, Karen Smith: “She’s having a ball.”

– Lindsay Tice

Snowe among most powerful, again

She’s more powerful than Elizabeth Dole, Diane Sawyer and the queen of England.

At least according to Forbes Magazine.

In this year’s list of the 100 most powerful women in the world, Forbes ranked U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe No. 54. She jumped four spots from last year’s rank of 58.

The list is based on each woman’s visibility in the press and economic impact. According to the ranking, she wields more power than the president of Paramount pictures (No. 69), two queens (England and Jordan, Nos. 75 and 80) and the French minister of foreign trade (No. 88).

“If my inclusion in this list has any impact at all, I sincerely hope it will inspire the next generation of women in Maine and across the country to follow their dreams and realize that there are no limits to what they can achieve,” Snowe said in a press release Friday.

The Maine Republican is more powerful than billionaires, chief executives and the co-founder of the Gap, but she’ll have to climb past Katie Couric (No. 47), Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling (No. 40), Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (No. 26) and Oprah Winfrey (No. 9) to get near the top.

And then, of course, there’s U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

This year, like last, she’s No. 1.

– Lindsay Tice
LaMarch is national Green co-chair

Maine’s Patricia LaMarche has been elected one of six co-chairs of the national Green Party. LaMarche, who was the Green vice presidential candidate in 2004, was elected at the party’s July 24-25 annual meeting in Oklahoma.

During that meeting LaMarche and others raised money for two Tulsa-area shelters, one for domestic violence victims and the other for children of murdered parents. The fund-raising effort is a legacy of LaMarche’s “Left-Out Tour,” in which she visited domestic violence and homeless shelters throughout the country. LaMarche lives in Yarmouth.

Also at the Oklahoma meeting, state Rep. John Eder of Portland, the only Green representative in the Maine Legislature, was elected to the national Coordinated Campaign Committee. Nancy Allen of Brooksville, Maine, the party’s national media coordinator, is retiring to spend more time helping Maine Greens get elected.

There are 24,155 registered Green voters in Maine, according to the secretary of state’s office.

– Bonnie Washuk