Brother, Spare a Lobe?

Brother Can You Spare a Lobe?

On the advice of my doctors, I am, at this time, seeking prospective live liver donors. Briefly, a lobe of the donor’s liver, or a portion of a lobe, is removed and placed inside the recipient. In this case, me. Evidently, the donor’s liver almost completely re-grows in one or two weeks, and the recipient grows a complete new liver in just a little longer.

Sound too good to be true? Well, the re-growing part is true enough, but there is risk. And not everyone is an appropriate match for donation. First, the donor must have a compatible blood type (type A or type O to donate to me). Then there are matters of geometry—that ducts and veins are at the right places. And it is major surgery and as the red badge of your courage and generosity you would get a scar shaped like a big peace sign, or, say, a three-way plate boundary, like where the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden meet the East African Rift.

You would also have to make several trips to UCSF in San Francisco for more tests and scans than you had ever heard of. A lot of this is for your protection—you would be assigned a doctor-advocate, separate from my surgical team, to watch out for your interests. They want to be sure there is no coercion, so I can’t offer you money or anything, except the kind of gratitude that I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to live up to.

Prospective donors must be 18 to 60 years in age and basically healthy, with a healthy liver. I think I read that they would want you to be tobacco free for six weeks prior to the operation. You can’t be overweight, or not by much. While blood type is all-important, kinship ties confer no advantage. My insurance covers all of it, but UCSF may want you to have your own anyway. You would have to be able to be off from work four to eight weeks.

So, why not just wait for a cadaverous liver? First, there is a big shortage of cadavers in California. So I would have to wait for 15 to 18 months to get to the top of the transplant list. And liver cancer is chaotic. If it were to spread outside of the liver I’d be off the list and out onto an iceberg. That will be the subject of a future essay but for now, well, lots can happen, like I could get really sick. The good part of the live transplant is that the procedure can be scheduled. And it can be done while I’m still fairly healthy, which except for these persistent proofs that I have cancer, I still am.

And see, taking a cadaverous liver isn’t “free” either—that’s a liver that someone else will die waiting for. So by donating a liver lobe to me, you are not only saving my life, but, between us, through the regeneration, we are saving yet a third life. (You could tell that story to explain the three-arm rift scar on your belly.)

Blood type A or O is most of you. If you think you might like to have a hand in keeping me alive through the wonderful sophistication of 21st century medicine, or just want to find out more about the procedure, no promises and no expectations, drop me a note and I will put you in touch with the appropriate doctor at UCSF, or just call the UCSF Transplant Office at 415-353-1888 and they’ll start the ball rolling.  It often takes many tries to find a match (one friend had seven live donors, none of whom passed the hurdles).

And, lastly, you can back out at any time.

Blessings, from the Universe, for all.
Dale
dphool@botanikos.com