ticked these boxes, said Dr. Justin Steggerda. He’s a transplant surgeon at Cedars who also took part in the operation.
“He had family around him to provide support, make sure he took his medication, and give him the internal motivation to get through a really difficult operation,” Steggerda told HealthDay. “He had strength in his body and mind to get through this surgery.”
And he did. “He is doing excellent,” Steggerda said.
Sams “does not require any dialysis and his liver is functioning appropriately,” Gunn noted.
Finding the right match
Of course, people who receive organ donations must take immunosuppressant medicines for the rest of their lives to make sure their body doesn’t reject the donated organ or organs.
“The heart team does a lot of the management of immunosuppressants, as the heart is the most likely organ to be rejected,” Steggerda noted.
Triple transplants are also very risky.
“Not all medical centers in the U.S. offer transplants, and even among those that do, not many offer dual organ transplants, let alone triple organ transplants,” Steggerda said.
These multi-organ transplants also require a lot of resources. “It is not always easy to identify the right patient and donor and also have the timing work out,” Steggerda said.
So before transplantation is even considered, each transplant team has to first evaluate the patient. “It is hard to find a match of three good organs from one donor,” Steggerda said.
As the surgical director of liver transplantation at the University of California-San Diego Health, Dr. Gabriel Schnickel has had some experience working on “triple transplant” teams.
“We are getting better at doing these operations, and collaboration between surgeons has gotten better, too,” he told HealthDay.
Certain advances have helped move the needle. For example, Schnickel said he uses what’s known as a perfusion machine to help extend the time that a liver is viable outside of the body.
“This allows us to minimize the stress on the new heart when we put the liver in as blood flow through the liver can be stressful on a brand-new heart,” Schnickel explained.