25 YEARS ON: TOTS WHO Reunited.. the
FIVE adults sit on a hospital floor together – recreating their part in making medical history 25 years ago.
Among them is the first British child saved by a pioneering transplant that saw her mum risk her life to donate a slice of her own liver to her daughter.
Now Audrey Carolan, 27, has made a pilgrimage back to the hospital where the op took place.
And, together with four others alive today because of a living donor transplantation in childhood, she recreated the picture taken of them all at King’s College Hospital in South London in 1994.
Audrey said: “My mother did the most amazing thing for me all those years ago.
“There wasn’t any other parent to talk to who had been there before and had the surgery.
“She was the pioneer and it was incredibly brave to be the first parent donor.”
In 1993, 10 per cent of babies in need of a liver transplant died on the waiting list because of a shortage of donor organs.
RISK
But living donor transplantations – using a segment of a family member’s liver – already had the potential to save dozens of children’s lives every year.
The procedure had been carried out abroad, mainly in Germany, Japan and America.
But some senior British surgeons believed it was unethical to risk a healthy person’s life, even for the sake of their own child.
Yet after a two-year campaign by surgeons at King’s College Hospital, the objections were overcome and the Department for Health authorised and funded a trial of five transplants.
First was 14-month-old Audrey, of Stevenage, Herts, desperately ill with liver failure when surgeons were given the go-ahead to carry out the trail-blazing surgery in October 1993.
She weighed just 15 pounds – the size of a baby half her age – and had only six months to live.
She was born with biliary atresia, a condition where the bile duct is blocked, and her only chance of life was a liver transplant. And just weeks before her op, there was a reminder of just how dangerous it could be. A 29-year-old German mum had died giving part of her liver to try to save her child.
Over 12 hours, leading transplant surgeon Dr Kai-Chah Tan removed the left lobe of her 41-year-old mum Veronica’s liver and transplanted it into Audrey.
Today Audrey is fit and well and working for a sexual health charity. Veronica also made a full recovery.
Audrey said: “The transplant saved my life and meant that I had a happy, healthy childhood.
“I did have to have a full transplant in
2002 due to complications, but now I’m fighting fit again.”
Veronica, now 67 and a Church of
England vicar in
Whitby, North
Yorks, says: “I had faith it would be all right. I also felt I had very little choice. My husband Eddie and I were told that without a transplant our daughter – my only child – would be dead by Christmas. “If anything was a spur to go ahead, it was the thought that we were so close to losing Audrey.”