A daughter saves her father’s life — by giving him part of her liver
‘Of course I’m going to do this’
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Lenny Bernstein.
At his home in McLean, Va., 70-year-old Wayne Cooper was losing weight quickly. He slept all day. Patricia Cooper, an immigration attorney in Miami, called her father frequently. “He was too tired to hold the phone,” she said.
His only hope of surviving liver disease was a transplant, which his doctors agreed was all but a fantasy. In a nation with a severe shortage of donor livers, Wayne Cooper was too far down the list to have any chance of receiving one.
He has diabetes and, most importantly, heart problems that make liver surgery difficult.
On Dec. 5, Patricia donated more than half her liver to her father, an obstetrician who 34 years earlier had personally brought her into this world.
“It wasn’t even a choice. It’s my dad. Of course I’m going to do this,” said Patricia, the oldest of three children. “I knew the mental anguish of him dying and me thinking I could have done something to save his life was going to be worse than any physical pain.”
Living-donor liver transplants
Though living-donor liver transplants have been performed in the United States for nearly three decades, they are still rare. In 2016, just 345 of the 7,841 livers used in transplants came from living donors, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which coordinates transplant lists. U.S. hospitals use living donors more commonly for kidney transplants. Elsewhere, including Turkey and South Korea, live donors are the standard for liver transplants.
The critical difference in live-liver donation is that, unlike other organs, livers regenerate. If the donor and recipient match in a variety of ways, surgeons can take a portion of a donor’s liver and transplant it, skipping what can be a years-long wait for a cadaver liver that too often ends in a patient’s death.
Yet living-donor transplants expose two people — one of them perfectly healthy — to the rigors and risks of major surgery.
Two people could die, instead of one.
They had been turned down by at least one other program, which considered their case too risky, but eventually the Coopers underwent their procedures at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.
The procedures
Initially, her father rejected the idea of taking her liver, until she pointed out that he would have done anything to help his own father, who died at 58 of heart disease.
“She’s a lawyer,” Wayne Cooper said. “She’s good with words. So she turned the tables on me.”
On the day of the operations at the University of Maryland Medical Center, the two were placed in adjacent rooms. John C. LaMattina, director of the medical school’s living-donor liver transplantation program, and another surgeon began removing the lobe of Patricia’s liver. About 90 minutes later, Rolf N. Barth, director of liver transplantation, and a fourth surgeon began preparing Wayne to receive the transplant. Timing was critical to minimize the time the organ was outside both bodies. In between, it was stored in a cold solution.
Patricia gave her father the entire right lobe of her liver, about 59 percent of her liver volume, LaMattina said.
Typically, the lobe is between 60 and 70 percent of a donor’s liver volume.
In Maryland’s program, which does about a dozen live-liver transplants each year, recipients fare as well or slightly better than individuals who receive cadaver livers, Barth and LaMattina said. The same is true nationally, according to UNOS data. Research has not shown a large impact on living donors, though a small number have suffered complications.
Today, Wayne Cooper is recuperating well at home. He is on immunosuppressants so that his body doesn’t reject his daughter’s organ and takes about 20 pills a day, including diabetes and heart medications. The twin surgeries cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, most of which will be covered by Medicare.
Cooper and the doctors expect that he will die one day of something other than liver disease.
Patricia returned to work part-time last Tuesday. A competitive master’s swimmer, she is suffering most from fatigue and the incision made in the thick muscles of her abdomen.
“When these [surgeries] go well, they are wonderful, wonderful things,” LaMattina said. “This is a story about the donor. The donor is going through something they don’t need, that’s a big deal, that’s a risk, to do something for someone they care about.”
