Liver transplant recipient Maryann Steinbock told a throng of reporters she had a "second chance" at life, then held her nurses' hands as she walked back to her room at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. (Ryan Tracy/The Bronx Ink)

Surrounded by a throng of reporters and cameras, Maryann Steinbock kept on smiling. It seemed every time she spoke, there was someone else to thank.

The donor of the liver that happened to be a match. The medical staff from Buffalo, N.Y., who shepherded her new organ to the airport Friday morning in the midst of a snowstorm. The police officers who mobilized on short notice to clear a path from her Long Island home to the Bronx’s Montefiore Medical Center. The doctors, nurses and anesthesiologists who spent six hours in the operating room during her life-saving transplant surgery later that day.

“It was just like watching a movie on TV,” Steinbock, 59, told a pack of media on Tuesday. “Everything fell into place. It was wild.”

Steinbock, a wedding coordinator and avid New York Mets fan who lives with her husband in Atlantic Beach, had been on the liver transplant waiting list for about a year after her hepatitis C was diagnosed. Doctors told her she had carried the disease unknowingly for decades. Tumors had grown on her liver, and she needed a new organ to survive.

While she waited, doctors twice had to operate. If the tumors had grown too large or spread too far, a liver transplant would not have saved her. Surgeons twice burned tumors off her liver’s surface to control the cancer’s expansion.

Then, after a year of waiting, it was a race through a blizzard and against time.

“The longer the liver is outside of the body, the less chance that it is going to function perfectly,” said Dr. Milan Kinkhabwala, chief of Montefiore’s liver transplant program.

After doctors determined the donated organ was a match and arranged for it to ride downstate on an emergency flight, Montefiore staff woke Steinbock, who friends call “Mak”, and gave her the news.

“I think she went into shock,” recalled Steinbock’s husband, Corey. Outside, the couple’s cars had been buried by the pre-dawn snow. By 6 a.m., Corey had dug out their vehicles and had both engines running in the driveway. Montefiore staff, however, insisted that she wait for a police escort to navigate the wet driving conditions.

Nassau County’s Fourth Precinct agreed to pick up Steinbock. The New York Police Department’s Highway Patrol scrambled to meet her at the city line.

“We usually know what’s coming ahead of time,” Highway Patrol Officer Stephen Brooks said, referring to cross-border police escorts. “This was a play-it-by-ear kind of thing, and usually it’s not in a snowstorm.”

Once her car neared Queens, Steinbock could not help but chat up Nassau County’s Officer Robert Prince about that borough’s hometown baseball team. But her mood became serious once she arrived at the hospital and doctors began to explain the details of the surgery.

Maryann Steinbock told her story to New York-area media Tuesday in a packed hallway in Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. (Ryan Tracy/The Bronx Ink)

Upon hearing the procedure required a neck incision to keep fluids flowing to her body, “she jumped off the table,” her husband said. Steinbock calmed after a phone call from her son, a doctor near Boston, who explained the surgery was a matter of life and death.

After six hours of work by three surgeons, two nurses and two anesthesiologists, Steinbock had a healthy liver and what she called “a second chance at life.”

Smiling and shaking her head, Steinbock repeated one explanation before the outstretched microphones: “If it wasn’t for God, none of this would have happened.”