From the moment we met and gave each other a hug it felt so comfortable,’ says Tracey Pescod, describing meeting Judy Coutinho for the first time a couple of weeks ago.
‘We’d been messaging each other a lot but actually to meet her in person was something I will never forget,’ says Tracey, still tearful at the memory.
Like any new friends, ‘we talked about our children and showed each other photos’. But this interest in each other’s family went
A Maryland man with a terminal heart disease has become the second-ever patient to receive a genetically modified pig heart.
This week, Lawrence Faucette, 58, underwent transplant surgery after being deemed ineligible for a human heart transplant due to peripheral vascular disease, which reduces blood circulation.
The procedure, known as a xenotransplant, has only been performed once before on an ex-convict who died two months later. Both historic procedures were performed at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC).
Mr
Before any major operation key members of the surgical team meet to discuss logistics – but it is rare to find as eminent and wide-ranging a group as the one assembled at Oxford’s Churchill hospital one chilly morning last February.
Not just the health but the happiness of two very special patients was at stake. In a ground-breaking British first, a 40-year-old woman (a mother of two) was about to donate her womb to her younger sister, in the hope
Surgeons have successfully transplanted two pig kidneys into a brain dead human, marking another ‘significant step’ in the decades-long quest to use animal organs for life-saving transplants.
Jim Parsons, 57, from Huntsville, Alabama, was brain dead – and therefore declared officially deceased – in September after suffering a traumatic head injury while dirt bike racing.
With his family’s blessing, researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham performed the pioneering transplant on him just four days later.
Mr Parsons’ own
Transplant patients could routinely be given animal organs within years, according to the surgeon behind the world’s first operation to give a dying man a pig heart.
Many experts see the field – known as xenotransplantation – as a solution to a global shortage of human organ donors that is expected to get worse as we live longer.
Last week, a genetically modified pig heart was transplanted into a terminally ill heart failure patient and the organ appears to be
A second woman in less than a month has been denied the opportunity to have a life-saving organ transplant simply because she won’t get vaccinated against COVID.
Leilani Lutali, 56, from Colorado has been denied the chance to have a kidney transplant after the hospital that would have been performing the operation refused to treat her because she hadn’t had the coronavirus vaccine.
Lutali who has stage 5 kidney disease, desperately needs transplant to save her life but in September,
Transplant patient Steve Harrison has barely left his house since the end of February last year, because he’s terrified of catching Covid. And with good reason.
The 38-year-old logistics manager suffered kidney failure, and in December, after a torturous ten-month wait, he finally underwent a kidney transplant. But the drugs Steve takes to ensure his body does not reject the new kidney suppress his immune system – and, unfortunately, this has rendered the Covid vaccine ineffective on him.
He’s not
