Articles labeled: organ donation

Brianna Jeffries, a 4-year-old with a “rare cancerlike condition”, is amongst the thousands of people in Illinois alone that is waiting for an organ transplant. She’s been hoping to receive a liver transplant for 6 months now, and without one her health is likely to continue to deteriorate. That’s why we here at MT urge people and their families to become organ donors — someday you might be able to save a life like Brianna’s, and provide a “miracle”.

Brianna has a rare cancerlike condition that ultimately destroyed the bile ducts in her liver. Without them, Brianna’s liver can’t absorb fat from the food she eats, leaving her chronically malnourished.

A liver transplant would allow her to grow to a normal height and weight. But Brianna can’t get one until complications from her illness — Langerhans cell histiocytosis — can be brought under control.

As sick as she is, it’s hard to see Brianna as anything other than a lively preschooler who likes “Dora the Explorer,” drawing pictures and singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to all who will listen.

“She’s definitely the life of the floor,” Brianna’s mom, Veronica Jeffries, said while watching her daughter chat with nurses at the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital.

We’re huge proponents of organ donation, so we’re sure we would have made the same decision as Lisa and Jim Koehne, who donated their 15-year-old son Alex’s liver, pancreas and kidneys after he died from what they thought was bacterial meningitis. So imagine how crushed they must feel after learning their very generous act led to even more heartache:

But it was only after the transplants were performed that autopsy results revealed Alex had a deadly cancer known as anaplastic T-cell lymphoma — not bacterial meningitis.

“We were shellshocked by the whole situation,” Jim Koehne said on “GMA” today. “We had a lot of questions.”

Patient privacy laws prevented the Koehnes from ever meeting the recipients of their son’s organs.

“Two things we did think of [once we learned the truth], one, the recipients, are they OK? Are they all right?” said Lisa Koehne, who added the organ recipients’ doctors had be notified about the situation before she and her husband learned the truth.

“They said they’ll be monitored and looked after,” Jim Koehne said doctors told him.

After the operation, the recipients of the organs all showed evidence of the cancer. The recipient of Alex’s liver underwent three cycles of chemotherapy before finally succumbing to the tumors brought about by the lymphoma. The woman who received Alex’s pancreas initially responded well to treatment but she, too, later died.

Just want to emphasize that we are not placing any blame or fault on the Koehne family.

British teenager Laura Moon went to her doctor for an ultrasound after she began suffering chronic stomach pain. What they saw shocked everyone — Laura has four kidneys. This is not unheard of, but extremely rare — and news to us, apparently having three kidneys isn’t all that uncommon. Well, Laura doesn’t want to be an organ hog so she has decided to donate two of them:

Laura, a customer services adviser from Leeds, said: “I think if I’ve got four, I don’t need all four. Why not donate if there’s someone else in need?

“I hope I can help somebody else while I am young. I will do everything in my power to become a donor.”

It is not known why people develop multiple, or duplex, organs but one in 125 people have one extra kidney, normally a partial organ.

Laura’s condition often causes the patient no problems, although sufferers can be more prone to urinary infections.

She discovered she had the unusual anatomy six months ago when she was undergoing tests following a road accident.

“I was in a car crash a year ago and six months later I began having a lot of pain in my stomach. My GP referred me to the hospital for a scan.”