Next Step

To continue the story.......

My father-in-law, myself and husband went for his two day appointment at the Lahey Clinic in August of 2005. The first day was a sort of meet and great with the doctors and they reviewed what type of liver transplants there are. You ask, well what types are there? Well, there are two ways a liver transplant can be done: the first is a cadaver, which is the old fashion way so to speak, where, a liver it taken from an organ donor and placed in a recipient who is on the list. The second is the live donor program. What this is, a person donates part of their liver to someone who is on the liver donation list and the liver will grow back to what the donor’s body will need.

So, at this meeting we learned about both types of donation, what gets a person on the big list, what a liver looks like and its functions, if someone would like to become a live donor what they should do, and everything along those lines. The first day was an educational type of appointment.

The second day of appointments was for the tests. The tests my father-in-law had to go through was cat scans, liver scans, blood tests and every other test you can think of. The clinic needed to really look into his health since he was showing he was serious he was about a transplant since he was there to learn about it.

Also, we were not the only family there. There was about 6 other families there doing the same thing as we were. It’s amazing how many people need some type of liver help and what stage of liver failure they were in.

The next step was to wait and see if my father-in-law makes the liver transplant list.