Motivational. Inspirational
Based: Cape Town
Gabi Lowe studied a BA before embarking on a successful career in media and marketing. In 2011 she was catapulted into a totally new world, that of rare diseases, big pharma and transplantation, filled with massive challenges, learnings, losses and love. After an extraordinary four-year battle, Gabi Lowe lost her beautiful, talented 20-year old daughter, Jenna Lowe to a rare, degenerative lung disease. The date was the 8th of June 2015 and that rare disease which claimed her young life was pulmonary arterial hypertension – and that followed a double lung transplant.
Jenna was young, bright, beautiful and articulate. She was LEAD SA’s Youth Hero of the Year in 2015. Her death was mourned by thousands of people whose lives she had touched. During her short but full life, Jenna and the Lowe family raised much needed awareness around this rare and devastating disease, highlighting the dire need for access to medication and organ donors locally.
Although desperately ill, Jenna became the face for organ donation in South Africa through the hugely successful #Get Me To 21 campaign in which she invited all South Africans to attend her 21st birthday celebration by clicking on a link to become an organ donor. Tragically Jenna died three months before reaching her milestone. Brilliantly written, riveting in all its terrible truth and pain, in this brutally honest memoir Gabi Lowe shares her family’s desperate fight to save Jenna’s life.
Despite their tragic loss, Gabi’s deeply moving story, “Get me to 21” will be published in 2019 and will inspire all who read it – or hear the story – to believe that the ability to face even the darkest and most unimaginable lives deep within us all.
Gabi is now a sought-after life coach, facilitator of workshops on emotional resilience and inspirational speaker. She lives in Cape Town with her husband Stuart and daughter Kristi.