Making Deadline With A Transplant

Delivered on Dec. 30 at Georgetown University Hospital, Peter was yellow with jaundice by his second day of life. Liver tests showed severe elevations of certain enzymes. It took more than four weeks to determine the diagnosis: biliary atresia, a rare condition -- only one in 15,000 U.S. children a year is born with it -- that causes the liver to destroy itself. Despite stopgap surgery when Peter was 6 weeks old, Herridge and her husband, J.D. Hayes, came to understand that only a liver transplant could save their son.

"When they told us he needed the transplant, it was difficult," Herridge says, "because you know that to get another organ, another child is going to have to die."

Peter went on the transplant list at the end of March. On April 26, Herridge got a call: There might be a liver for Peter. Herridge and Hayes had decided beforehand to have the procedure done at the renowned liver transplant center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Herridge was at a courthouse in Virginia, awaiting the verdict in the trial of (eventually convicted) terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. She called Fox News and begged her boss to send a backup immediately.

The liver went to another child.

Shortly after, Herridge went to Pittsburgh to be screened as a potential live donor for her son. Because the liver is an organ that can regenerate, a healthy individual can donate a portion of her liver and go on to live a normal life.

According to George Mazariegos, the hospital's director of pediatric transplantation (and Peter's surgeon), hospitals exercise caution about recommending live donation as a first option because there is a "small but real risk" to the donor; generally, he says, recommendations are heavily influenced by the status of the patient. In Peter's case, he was deteriorating rapidly.

Peter's mother was a "perfect match," says Amadeos Marcos, chief of the transplant division at the hospital and the man who performed Herridge's surgery.

"I felt that whatever happened, even if it didn't work out, I would know that I had gone to the mat for him," Herridge recalls. "That, as a parent, there was nothing else I could have done."

The surgeries took place on June 6. Herridge's lasted 7 hours; Peter's, 10. Afterward, the medical team told Herridge that, judging from the scarring on his liver, Peter had been so sick by the time they operated that he probably wouldn't have lasted the summer. He might not have been able to survive a surgery if they had waited even a few weeks.

The family remained in Pittsburgh for two months; while Herridge was released after eight days, Peter needed to be constantly monitored, and struggled with a collapsed lung and not-unusual rejection symptoms three weeks after the transplant. But overall, he responded very well, and the family returned home last week. Hayes, a matter-of-fact guy who works as an independent contractor doing science and technology research, spent his days with Jamie, a generally happy-go-lucky kid.

Jamie, his parents say, seemed pretty resilient, save for the day when his father heard him crying in the bedroom of the family's rented apartment in Pittsburgh. Hayes found him sitting in the middle of his mother's open suitcase, holding two of Peter's little undershirts, each pressed to a cheek. "Baby! Baby!" he wailed.

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