Media Contact: Sandra VanE-mail: [email protected]Telephone: 1-800-880-2397
LOS ANGELES (Dec. 14, 2001) -- The Chavez family has something extra to celebrate this holiday season -- the gift of life, given from one sister to another. After 10 years of living with liver disease, Juanita Chavez, 30, received on Nov. 13, a portion of her sister Maria Elena's liver. Maria Elena lives in Keene, CA, and Juanita lives in Los Angeles. The sisters are the daughters of Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farmer Workers of America, AFL-CIO (UFW), and Richard Chavez, a long-term UFW board member and the brother of Cesar Chavez, also a UFW co-founder. Following their successful transplant, the sisters and their family are on a mission to enhance understanding and awareness of living donor organ transplants -- especially in Hispanic communities.
The transplant was performed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center by transplant teams led by Christopher R. Shackleton, M.D., Director of the Multi-Organ Transplant Program and Center for Liver and Kidney Diseases and Transplantation; and Steven D. Colquhoun, M.D., Program Director for Liver Transplantation.
According to Juanita, she was diagnosed in 1991 with chronic active autoimmune hepatitis. However, because her disease was sometimes in remission and she was able to function more or less normally, she was not high enough on the transplant list to receive a donated organ. Things changed this past August, however.
While on a family trip to Colorado, Maria Elena and Dolores received word from Los Angeles, where Juanita is an elementary school teacher. She was in the hospital and needed a transplant -- soon. They cut short their vacation and headed west, discussing on the way the possibility of a living donor transplant. Several of Juanita's 19 siblings and half-siblings, along with numerous cousins, nephews and nieces, stepped forward to offer to be living donor candidates. And matching actions to words, these caring family members immediately began altering their diets and refrained from alcohol consumption in case they would be called upon to donate. However, it was eventually decided that Maria Elena was the most likely candidate. "Juanita and I had always been very close," she remembers. "Because of her liver disease, we knew she would not be able to have children, and I had agreed several years earlier to have her children for her if need be, so it was only natural for me to share my liver with her."
While Maria Elena was a totally willing donor, she was not without fears and concerns. "I'd never had an operation before, she says, and that was scary. While I realized there were definitely risks, I also learned that after recuperating, Juanita's quality of life would be greatly improved, and that was what I wanted for her."
Juanita, too, had fears that she would be endangering the life of one of her siblings, but with the need for a liver imminent, she discussed with her doctors at Cedars-Sinai the possibility of a living donor transplant. "Obviously, my previous reluctance was based on ignorance," Juanita says now. "The doctors answered even my most trivial questions as if they were of the utmost importance," she says. "Once the kind liver transplant team at Cedars-Sinai provided me with factual information, I was able to make an informed decision and share that information with my family."
If the two sisters had moments of trepidation, their mother was confronting her own fears as they related to major operations on two of her children. "I've been arrested more than 20 times in conjunction with my work for the UFW and beaten by the police in 1998 in San Francisco," she says. "But none of those experiences came close to creating the type of fear I felt for my daughters."
On the morning of the transplant, Maria Elena was asked to be at the hospital at 5:30 a.m., and Juanita not until 7:30. However, upon her arrival, Maria Elena was greeted by not only Juanita (who was wearing a Mexican style shirt that matched her sister's), but also by numerous family members who were there to offer their love, courage and support. "Having our family present, supporting us, made me feel, it's really hard to put into words, the best thing I can say is -- blessed," Juanita remembers. "Many of them got up before daylight and drove several hours to the hospital, just so they could be with us."
Maria Elena agrees. "Family members were with us in the hospital all the time," she says. "I really believe it was that love and support, along with the many prayer that were going up on our behalf, that helped us through this experience. That's what got me through the times when I was scared."
After the transplant, the two sisters experienced somewhat of a role reversal, which is not uncommon, says Dr. Shackleton. While Maria Elena was experiencing normal post-operative discomfort, her sister Juanita, who for the first time in 10 years now had a fully functioning liver, felt energized and ready to take on the world. At first, the sisters weren't strong enough to go to each others' rooms, so family members video-taped messages they made for each other and carried the videos back and forth between Maria Elena's room and the Intensive Care Unit where Juanita was located.
As their condition improved, though Juanita and Maria Elena were soon able to "hang out" in each other's hospital rooms. On one occasion, Juanita used the hydraulics on her hospital bed to maneuver herself into a position where she could French braid Maria Elena's hair. From then on, they referred to Juanita's room as the "Hydraulic Beauty Salon." Another time, Juanita went to Maria Elena's room and climbed into bed with her sister so they could watch the Jennifer Lopez concert together on TV together.
"The doctors were great," says Maria Elena. "They saw us every day, kept us updated and were always very positive and supportive, explaining what was happening and reassuring us."
Juanita agrees. "I never imagined I would have so many people who were previously strangers, doing everything in their power to realize my goal of a successful transplant. I love Cedars-Sinai people."
On Wednesday, November 21, the day before Thanksgiving, Maria Elena was released from the hospital, and her sister came home a few days later. Both are doing well and are committed to using their experience to help educate others about the benefits of becoming an organ donor. Maria Elena, a recent graduate of the USC School of Film and Television, is developing a bilingual documentary that will help raise awareness and understanding. Dolores is equally committed and hopes to work various agencies to provide organ donor information in Spanish.
"Our family has a long history of activism and community service," says Maria Elena. "After this experience, we have an expanded sense of purpose. We want to help educate Latinos in the community and make them aware that by becoming an organ donor, they may be able to save the life of someone they love."
# # #SIDEBAR: LIVER TRANSPLANT FACTS
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is now doing about 50 liver transplants per year and the number continues to increase. At present, approximately 25 percent of liver transplants at Cedars-Sinai are from living donors and this percentage is increasing rapidly. This is a consequence of the ever-expanding disparity between recipient need and the available supply of cadaver donor organs.
Only about 10 percent of the nation's 122 liver transplant programs have done 10 or more adult-to-adult living donor liver transplantation (AALDLT) operations, Cedars-Sinai among them (15 as of Dec., 2001).
At Cedars-Sinai, the success rate of AALDLT is about 10-15 percent better than that of cadaver liver transplants. Moreover AALDLT patients have shorter hospital stays.
The overall liver transplant success rates at Cedars-Sinai are about 10 percent higher than the national average for patients with similar disease severity. For patients who receive cadaver liver transplants at Cedars-Sinai, the success rate is about 85 percent. For AALDLT it is about 95 percent.
The national liver transplant waiting list continues to grow at about 30 percent per year (now close to 20,000) while the number of cadaver organs has been relatively static at about 4200 per year.
The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) has reported that it is anticipated that fewer than 50 percent of those listed for transplantation will ever receive one. About 10 percent of those waiting for a liver die each year without the chance for a transplant. The majority of patients who do receive a cadaver organ are now very ill by the time they get the transplant (96 percent at Cedars-Sinai are in the highest risk category at the time of transplantation).
AALDLT is a relatively new operation that offers considerable promise to improve this situation but its potential risks and overall role remain to be determined. While the moral precedent for living donation is well established with kidney transplantation, the AALDLT operation places the donor at considerably higher risk than does kidney donation due to the magnitude of the donor operation.
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For media information and to arrange an interview, please contact Sandy Van via e-mail at [email protected] or call 1-800-880-2397. You are welcome to use information from this news release in your stories, providing it is appropriately attributed.
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