[UA] (no subject)

[Greg Stolze]

Good grief!

>Anyway, the first transplant worked, but not well.  Theory is that the
>flat caused the liver to be out of a host a bit longer than it should have
>been.  For whatever reason, it didn't ever work very well.  I was in the
>hospital about 18 months out of the 2 years between my first and second
>transplant.

I took a course in biomedical ethics, and we did a whole week on
transplants.  One interesting element to the ethical mix is just how much
damage gets done in transport, and how traumatic it is for an organ to be
in a body that dies.

(One of the issues discussed was live harvesting from brain-dead patients.
If you have one patient who's in an irreversible coma with total cessation
of higher brain functions, and another patient who needs a heart and could
accept one from the first patient, do you kill the guy in the coma to save
the other patient?  Scary stuff...)

>The second transplant went much better than the first.  This was June '91.
> However, the liver suffered a couple of small lacerations in the car
>accident which killed the donor.  They were closed before transplant, but
>one of them opened back up after the surgery was over.  They kept giving
>me blood and couldn't figure out where it was going until they did an
>ultrasound and saw a mass of blood right next to the liver.  They opened
>me back up a week after the transplant and removed a clot of blood that
>massed 2.5kg.  That's the mass of a small newborn.  And it formed in one
>week.

Gyah!

>So far, the hepatitis has not recurred with this liver.

Good luck.

And, while it's OT, I'll repeat that business about signing your donor card
AND telling your relatives.  Mine all have very explicit directions to get
as much as they can, with specific instructions to conduct live transplants
before death in the case of irreversible coma.

-G.


Time flies.  Space just lies there.

Lazy, no good space...



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