"My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon" (bladder, surgery)

[Cida]

This is a touching personal story - but also worthwhile commentary about how the medical system works.



My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon
My 35 years living with two different donor hearts (I was 25 at the time of the first transplant) — finishing law school, getting married, becoming a mother and writing two books — has felt like a quest to outlast a limited life expectancy.
https://silk-news.com/2023/04/18/opi...will-die-soon/

[JoeJunior]

I had a close friend that received the heart out of a young fit athlete. They like to have never got him closed up.

He had many good years until bladder cancer raised its ugly head. He ended up having his bladder removed. And he said that the bladder surgery was a lot tougher than the heart replacement. The prosthesis to hold up his other organs was just awful.

[Texas Ag 93]

Interesting article, thanks for posting OP.

I completely understand what the author is getting at when she talks about what she calls the "gratitude paradox" where transplant recipients, families, and health care team members feel they just have to shut up and be thankful for the gift they received. As she accurately points out, this is not a constraint that anyone else who suffers from a life threatening condition is limited by.

Unfortunately, solid organ transplants are by definition from allogeneic donors (i.e. another individual, not the patient themselves), and that means a lifetime of potential complications and necessitates taking anti rejection drugs that destroy other organs and systems in the body, which is what has ultimately happened to the author.

So there's a reason that transplant centers measure success in years, much like how we describe cancer survivors. Getting a transplant (again, like many cancers) isn't necessarily "curative" and recipients often don't live to even an average lifespan. Not sure there's a solution here, but with more research, perhaps medical science can come up with less toxic anti-rejection meds, gene therapies, genetic modifications to organs pre transplant or even perhaps growing synthetically or artificially derived organs (though personally, I think those latter two options are too complex to work).