Melnyk or no one for most potential liver donors
Only 26 of more than 500 Canadians who answered Eugene Melnyk’s plea for a live liver donation said they would donate to someone other than the owner of the Ottawa Senators NHL hockey team.
Toronto’s University Health Network, where Melnyk is in intensive care after an eight-hour transplant Tuesday, said 12 of the 500 qualified as potential candidates for Melnyk and 26 said they would “be happy to be considered in the future for another person who may need a liver transplant.”
The person who donated part of their liver to Melnyk after an emotional request to Senators’ fans for help last week told doctors the “motivation to do this is to help Mr. Melnyk return to good health, to enjoy his family and friends and most importantly to bring the Stanley Cup home to the Ottawa Senators,” said Dr. David Grant, director of the Living Donor Liver Transplant Program.
“The donor hopes that others will be inspired by this story and will also consider organ donation.”
But what is being heralded as a boost for live organ donation has also been criticized for the way Melnyk used his profile to get help. The 55-year-old businessman got a transplant five days after the appeal while others wait far longer.
There was no queue-jumping — as widely suggested — the hospital insisted Thursday. There is only a waiting list for deceased donors’ organs, not live donations, said Dr. Atul Humar, medical director of the multi-organ transplant program.
“Really, overall (this is) a winwin situation, there’s nobody disadvantaged from this type of appeal,” he said. Both Melnyk and the donor are “stable and recovering well from their operations.”
Meanwhile, neither the Senators nor hospital officials would say why Melnyk qualified to receive a liver transplant at a hospital in Toronto given that he is a permanent resident of Barbados.
Eligibility rules under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan require patients to make their primary residence in Ontario and spend at least 153 days in any 12-month period to maintain coverage. The “snowbird” provision prevents patients from returning to Ontario only when they need health care.
The Ministry of Health would not discuss specifics of Melnyk’s case, but said: “There may be exceptional cases where non-resident Canadian citizens are in urgent need of an organ transplant. In the extreme circumstance where a patient’s life is in danger, the Ontario Public Hospitals Act requires medical professionals to provide care with the treatments available. In such exceptional cases, individual transplant programs will determine whether transplantation is the only viable treatment.”
It is possible that Melnyk, who is a Canadian citizen, spent enough time in Ontario in the past year to qualify for treatment. Alternatively, he could have paid out of pocket for the surgery, which doctors say was the only possible treatment to save his life.
The four doctors who spoke Thursday would not divulge the issue that sparked Melnyk’s need for a transplant, except to characterize it as “liver failure.” They would also not say anything about the donor. A match needs to have a compatible blood type, reasonablysized liver and “agreeable” anatomy, doctors said.
In adult-to-adult live transplantation, surgeons remove about 70 per cent of the liver from a donor, which will eventually regenerate. Melnyk’s surgeon, Dr. Ian McGilvray, said “that’s a big operation that carries a fair amount of risk,” such as bleeding and blood clots.
“Having said that, our donors do extremely well — we expect they’ll be home within about five to nine days, they’ll be back to work in two to three months ... some of them even play hockey.”