Organ transplants save lives, but New York state lags the nation in percentage of residents who are donors
The message on Cathy Murphy’s answering machine was succinct, to say the least. “Dr. Samstein here. Looking for Cathy Murphy. I have a liver.”
Ms. Murphy, 61 years old, suffered from severe cirrhosis after contracting hepatitis and had been waiting for a liver transplant for more than two years.
What she didn’t know at that moment in early November, as her family rushed to return the phone call from her physician, Benjamin Samstein, chief of liver transplantation and hepatobiliary surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was that she was about to receive the oldest liver ever transplanted in the U.S. Her donor was 93 years old.
“It doesn’t matter the age, just so long as the liver is in good condition,” she explained by phone from her home in Milford, Pa.
Unlike other organs, such as the heart and kidneys, which decline over time, a healthy liver has remarkable longevity. “It’s almost unheard of for people in their 80s and 90s to develop liver failure not related to alcohol or viral hepatitis,” Dr. Samstein said. “To me, a 93-year-old liver has decades of life left in it.”
ENLARGEHe previously performed liver transplants from donors almost that old. “I didn’t know at the time it was the oldest organ transplanted,” he added. “The difference between 93 and 92, or 91, didn’t come across to me that night.”
The organ had been medically evaluated and delivered to the hospital by LiveOnNY, one of 58 Organ Procurement Organizations, or OPOs, nationally and the one dedicated to the New York metropolitan area.
LiveOnNY’s office overlooking the Hudson River on West 34th Street (though the fast-rising Hudson Yards development is shortly to block the view) includes a donor center where staffers wait to jump into action, matching donors and recipients, when word arrives of an organ that has become available.
There’s also a laboratory where kidneys are processed before continuing on their lifesaving journey. Organs such as hearts and livers, because of their greater urgency, travel directly from the donor’s operating room to the transplant hospital.
When I visited a kidney had just arrived from Kentucky and was on its way to Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. “He’s checking the anatomy,” Helen Irving, LiveOnNY’s CEO and a former critical-care nurse, explained; we watched through the laboratory window while Abigo Cuenca, a preservationist, examined the organ. “He’ll flush the kidney, make sure the arteries and blood vessels are all open,” Ms. Irving said.
‘The fact that you can donate and give life into your 90s is something we need to communicate.’
There was no time to waste before the organ was loaded into a kidney preservation pump, a machine that would continue to flush the kidney with cold water as it headed to Montefiore Hospital by ambulance.
The machine is also equipped with GPS so that the surgeon awaiting its arrival can track its progress online through often uncooperative New York City traffic.
This kidney had been removed from its donor 39 hours earlier, a substantial amount of time to be outside a body.
Ms. Irving and Amy Friedman, LiveOn’s medical director, told me that I was fortunate to see an organ in transit since the region suffers from an acute shortage of organ donations.
ENLARGENew York ranks dead last out of the 50 states when it comes to the percentage of residents registered as organ donors, according to LiveOnNY. Dr. Samstein said that at his hospital last year about 1,100 people died, and approximately 10 of them were organ donors. “We can do better,” he said.
“We exist but for a brief moment in the cycle of life,” Dr. Samstein added. “The fact that you can donate and give life into your 90s is something we need to communicate.”
With the help of a group of New York real-estate professionals known as “Donate 8” (so named because it’s possible for one registered individual to donate up to eight organs), the LiveOnNY Foundation was created last month to raise awareness about the lifesaving potential people possess.
Ms. Murphy, now with a new liver, is well on the road to recovery. She’d been to the beauty parlor for the first time in months, and she and her husband were preparing for a trip to Florida.
“I feel amazing,” she said, while acknowledging she still has “a long road ahead of me.”
“We’re going to SeaWorld in Orlando,” she added. “We’re going to go on a wild boar hunt. How crazy is that?”
One bit of business remains, however. They plan to write a letter to the family of their donor. “We’re really looking forward to thanking them,” Ms. Murphy said. “They gave me a gift there’s no words for. I would like them to know they made a lot of people happy.”
—ralph.gardner@wsj.com