MOTHERLY LOVE
Waynesburg woman with cystic fibrosis undergoes fourth transplant
In the last seven years, Morgan Yoney has had two doublelung transplants and a liver transplant from deceased donors to help her deal with the cystic fibrosis that has racked her body since she was born.
But Tuesday, the 23-year-old Waynesburg woman — whose “Morgan’s Army” support team has raised awareness of her plight and organ donation over the last year as she awaited her second life-saving lung transplant — received a kidney transplant from a closer source: her mother.
“I know [people] say you’d do anything for your child,” Ms. Yoney said during a news conference Friday morning at UPMC Montefiore. “And I know she really would do anything for me.”
The kidney transplant came seven months after Ms. Yoney’s second double-lung transplant saved her life in December following a social media campaign offering her support and encouraging people to sign up as organ donors. The Facebook page for Morgan’s Army has 23,000 “likes” and is followed daily by hundreds of people checking in on updates of her condition — and now her mother’s.
“I feel good. A little sore,” Tammy Yoney said Friday. “The decision for me was pretty easy. As soon as it came up, I obviously said I wanted to donate.
“My biggest fear was losing her. It was an act of selfishness on my part” to donate, she said.
Morgan Yoney needed the kidney transplant because of the effects of years of anti-rejection drugs on her kidneys since she received her liver and first
double-lung transplant in 2010. Three years later, after she graduated from Waynesburg Central High School and began attending Slippery Rock University, her body began rejecting the lungs.
Last November, a month before her second lung transplant, she had to go on dialysis. She could have stayed on dialysis for years longer.
But getting a kidney transplant — particularly a living kidney donation transplant, which performs better and lasts longer than deceased kidney transplants — means that Morgan Yoney can “get back a normal life,” said Amit Tevar, UPMC’s director of kidney and pancreas transplants.
For the last eight months, on top of dealing with the after-effects of her lung transplant, she has endured the exhausting, three-days-a-week dialysis regiment that takes up to six hours a day and leaves patients tired afterward.
Morgan Yoney was born with cystic fibrosis, a progressive, genetic disease that causes a thick, sticky buildup of mucus in the lungs and digestive system.
Sixty years ago, people with cystic fibrosis almost never lived long enough to enter elementary school. Now, the average lifespan is near 40, according to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, thanks to advancements not only in transplants but daily treatments.
Morgan Yoney’s “prognosis is going to be remarkably good,” Dr. Tevar said. “Morgan has several things going for her: No. 1, she’s young and healthy.”
Jonathan D’Cunha, the UPMC surgeon who performed her lung transplant in December, said Morgan Yoney is doing “really good” for all of the difficulties she’s faced.
That included a longerthan-normal, 12-hour surgery to transplant her second set of lungs due to the scar tissue and other issues that come with operating on someone who is on a second transplant.
He said the five-year survival rate for lung transplant patients with cystic fibrosis is in line with national averages — about 60 percent to 70 percent — and slightly higher than patients with other diseases.
If Morgan Yoney’s lungs were to begin to fail, though, the prospects for a third lung transplant are thin.
It is “possible,” Dr. D’Cunha said, “but it’s pretty rare. We entertain [third lung transplants] on a case-by-case basis” because there is an even higher risk of failure the third time around.
He noted that Morgan Yoney also now has transplanted organs from three people, which adds complications to her treatment.
“There’s more things that her body is being subjected to” because of the three organs, he said.
Besides the medical recovery, Dr. Tevar said, “Morgan’s bravery is by far the most important thing.”
For her part, Morgan Yoney saw her attitude as the only position she could take.
“I was born with cystic fibrosis. This is what I’ve done my whole life. I’m used to it,” she said. “And I feel like if you try to stay on the positive side of things, you’re going to do better than if you were to look at things negatively.”
Tammy Yoney was able to return home Wednesday, a day after her donation surgery. Morgan Yoney is expected to be released Saturday, four days after her transplant surgery.
Morgan already has some big ideas about what she’d like to do now.
“I want to go travel,” she said, “and be able to do the things I wasn’t able to do because of dialysis.”
Her mother said that Morgan Yoney is thinking about going back to college, but she has yet to decide on a major or what she would do after school — something she will be able to do now.
“It’s hard to plan a future when you don’t know if you’re going to live,” Tammy Yoney said.