‘Super-human’ Jay, 7, given five organs in rare operation
ASEVEN-YEAR-OLD boy has been dubbed “super-human” by his mother after he had five organs transplanted in a single operation.
Jay Crouch is one of the youngest patients in the world to have the “incredibly rare” procedure.
Five of his organs were removed in one “block”, meaning there were just six connections needed to attach them to his arteries in the ten-hour operation at Birmingham Children’s Hospital.
The surgery is so rare that Birmingham Children’s Hospital said it has been 20 years since they last carried out a transplant like it.
Jay, from Market Harborough, in Leicestershire, received two kidneys, a liver, a pancreas and a small intestine.
Doctors removed his liver while the kidneys, pancreas, liver and intestine were being removed from the donor. The new set of organs were attached to Jay’s aorta in his stomach, giving him a blood supply from the heart.
The surgery was carried out by a team headed by transplant surgeon Khalid Sharif.
Jay is now learning how to eat and swallow.
He has been in and out of hospital his entire life after his small intestine twisted and died when he was just six weeks old.
His internal organs were so badly damaged he had to be fed through a tube in his stomach for years.
Jay’s mother, Katie Freestone, was told he would die without a transplant.
Ms Freestone, 28, got a call in March to say a matching donor – a young child who had died – had been found. Surgeons warned Ms Freestone Jay would face months of gruelling recovery – but he was discharged from hospital last week, just one month after the life-saving transplant took place.
Single mother Ms Freestone is now backing the Change The Law For Life campaign calling for an optout system for organ donation. She described Jay as “my little superhuman”.
But the full-time carer also constantly thinks about the child whose organs were donated to him.
Hospital bosses have not released any details and it is not known if the child’s family know they have saved a life. Ms Freestone said: “When I got the call, I cried, because I knew it was a smaller donor and that’s so sad. You can’t express your gratitude enough towards the donor. There are not enough words.”
Ms Freestone suspected was something badly wrong there with baby Jay when he struggled to feed and go to the toilet days after being born. Her “world fell apart” when he fell seriously ill aged just six weeks, leaving doctors at Kettering General Hospital baffled at first.
Jay will spend the next six months at home to minimise the risk of infection as his recovery continues.