Word: liverence
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...Children's Hospital, across the street from the Brigham, a twelve-year-old boy died June 17 from head injuries suffered in an auto accident. His parents, who refuse to be identified, consented to the transplant. While three surgeons removed and cooled the liver to retard deterioration, Dr. Francis D. Moore (TIME cover, May 3, 1963) and his Brigham team prepared Tommy Gorence to receive it. It was, says Moore, "a very arduous job because of the whopping size of Tommy's liver." Just to get at it entailed making three heroic incisions, two horizontal and one vertical...
Bypassed Duct. After the incisions were made, the real technical difficulties began. Moore and his chief assistant, Dr. Alan Birtch, clamped off the portal vein, which delivers blood to the liver for chemical processing, and the inferior vena cava. The hepatic artery, which delivers blood for the liver's own oxygen needs, was so damaged by pressure from the cancer as to be useless. Moore and Birtch decided to use in its place the right kidney artery. That meant removing the right kidney, but a single healthy kidney is all the body needs...
There was also the problem of the bile ducts. The donor liver had come with its gall bladder and ducts attached. Rather than attempt a dangerously delicate joining of the common duct to the duodenum, Moore decided to attach the new gall bladder itself to the duodenum, allowing the bile to bypass the common duct. The entire operation took eight hours. Not until Tommy Gorence was sitting up and eating well, apparently making a good recovery, did the Brigham publicize the case. Tommy made good progress for four weeks, then ran into difficulties with a lung infection, a common complication...
Less Suppression. Denver, where the first such operation was performed in March 1963 by the University of Colorado's Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, remains the liver-transplant capital of the world, with six recipients surviving. The early operations five years ago, says Starzl, were tragic. Although surgeons were sure that the procedure would work, the longest survival among the first patients was 23 days. In most cases, death resulted from infection, to which the patients were especially susceptible because of generous use of drugs to suppress the mechanism by which the body rejects foreign protein...
...serum or globulin extracted from horses into which human white blood cells had been injected (TIME, July 26). Only when the technique was developed satisfactorily did he begin transplanting again. In his second series, Starzl operated last year on Julie Rodriguez, now 21, who suffered from cancer of the liver. Julie has had to be readmitted for additional treatment, but has now survived for a record twelve months. Starzl has no hope of curing her cancer, which has spread. What is certain is that Julie has an effectively functioning transplanted liver. Starzl has also discharged two-year-old Randell Wayne...