The Gift of Life

Good morning!

We’ve had some great news out of the Medical Center this spring, and one more reason to celebrate is around the corner. Sometime in the next few weeks, we will mark our 3,000th organ transplant in our history.

The first was when Dr. James Hardy in 1963 became the first surgeon in the world to transplant a human lung into another human being. Talk about starting out with a bang! Even so, there were many detractors at the time of Dr. Hardy’s lung transplant. He faced pushback again when a year later, he transplanted the heart of a chimpanzee into a man – another worldwide first.

It would take time before the concept of organ transplantation would take root and Hardy would be highly regarded for pushing existing boundaries.

Of the 3,000 transplants, about 1,700 have been completed since UMMC recruited a top-notch liver transplant team in 2011-12 and a year later restarted that program after a 20-year hiatus.

Our transplant teams – yes, this is bigger than the surgeons, and they’ll be the first to tell you that – have given thousands a second chance at life, a second chance at quality of life and a second chance to wake up feeling good, perhaps for the first time in years. Our friends at the Mississippi Organ Recovery Agency call the donation of organs, eyes and tissue a “gift.” We’re thankful for the many families who, in their greatest moments of pain, make those gifts possible.

I’d like to tell you a little about just how deep transplant runs at the Medical Center and how it transcends the OR into just about every corner of the hospital. It may be cliché to call it the ultimate team sport, but, here, that’s accurate. Our transplant teams rack up wins every day, not just through the actual surgery, but in our care before and after transplant.

UMMC has the state’s sole transplant programs – organ, tissue, eye and bone marrow. As an academic medical center – also the only one in Mississippi – we have the infrastructure, specialized staff and deep support teams that no other hospital in the state can provide.  We have significantly grown our pre- and post-transplant services at UMMC Grenada, allowing dozens of patients from that region to get a substantial part of their care close to home and make fewer trips to Jackson.

From January 2013 through mid-April of this year, UMMC surgeons have performed (counting adult and pediatric cases) 1,143 kidney transplants, 76 of them from live donors; 344 liver; 49 pancreas, including 47 done as a kidney/pancreas combination; two isolated pancreas; and 104 heart.

Every transplant requires a combination of unique actions. No two cases are ever alike.

Patients needing a new organ receive care from a plethora of providers and departments, just about too many to name. They’ll develop a close relationship with the team at University Transplant.

Their health also will be monitored by their transplant coordinator, a registered nurse specially trained to be their “person,” answering their questions, referring them to providers, and making the all-important phone call to each: We have a liver (or kidney, or pancreas, or heart) for you.

From there, the flurry of activity speeds up. The expansive multidisciplinary team widens to include areas of the Medical Center whose employees might not even realize how important they are in making a transplant go off.

Think of it this way: In your grocery store, the milk is in the very back on purpose. When the customer walks to the coolers, they find themselves putting things in their buggy every step of the way. And so it is with transplant. You will get everything, every step of the way, because transplant requires everything.

There are dozens of people who walk with our transplant patients during their journey. It’s why academic medical centers do transplant best. It’s complex and complicated, but we have a world-class team. The proof is in the pudding when you consider a sampling of the accolades they’ve gathered since Jackson resident Karen Battle on March 5, 2013, became the revived program’s first liver transplant, saving her from the very brink of death.

Dr. Chris Anderson, professor and James D. Hardy Chair of Surgery, was recruited to UMMC as an associate professor and given the charge of rebuilding the liver transplant program. Dr. Mark Earl, now professor of transplant surgery, and Dr. Ashley Seawright, a transplant nurse practitioner who is now the Department of Surgery’s clinical director of transplant surgery and surgical oncology and surgical chief of advanced practice, are with Anderson as original providers on the team.

Our abdominal transplant surgeons also include Dr. James Wynn, professor of surgery; Dr. Felicitas Koller, associate professor of surgery; and Dr. Praise Matemavi, assistant professor of surgery.

In January, our liver transplant program was listed in the top three in the country by the federal Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients that compares transplant centers nationally. The Scientific Registry honor speaks in part to our adult abdominal transplant survival rates for the first year after surgery. For kidney, it’s 94.7 percent; for liver, it’s 97.49 percent.

In its annual ranking, Nephrology News and Issues in 2017 and 2020 named UMMC to its top 50 most active kidney transplant centers nationally. In 2018, Seawright was recognized with the American Society of Transplant Surgeons’ Advanced Transplant Provider Award. Earlier this month, our liver, kidney and bone marrow transplant programs achieved Center of Excellence level from the Optum Transplant Network, which helps hospitals address the high variable costs and clinical complexity of transplant cases.

More milestones followed Battle’s transplant: UMMC’s first pancreas/kidney transplant in December 2013. The first transplant of a pancreas without a kidney in 2014.  The first of four transplants splitting a liver between two recipients in 2017. The first liver-heart transplant in 2018. The first of five kidney/heart transplants in 2018. And, one patient over several years’ time received three organs – a heart, liver and kidney.

Our transplant program got a bold and masterful start when Hardy performed the world’s first human lung transplant, followed nine months later by the world’s first heart transplant into a human.

UMMC’s transplant teams of today are no less bold. We salute their daily walk with patients as they give them not just the gift of life, but the peace of mind and convenience that comes with having their transplant surgery close to home. It’s the intangible benefits like those that are woven into the care we provide in creating A Healthier Mississippi.