![]() So, timing is very important," Koffron said. "If you have to wait five years for a transplant - five times 15% - means there's a high likelihood you're not going to make it to your transplant. Treatment typically takes about four hours and must be performed three times per week. That's because about 15% of dialysis patients die due to complications each year, and dialysis can greatly limit one's quality of life. Alan Koffron, director of transplant and hepatobiliary surgery at Erlanger Health System, said that although dialysis can treat renal failure temporarily, transplantation is always preferred. The only treatments for kidney failure are dialysis, which uses a machine to perform the kidney's function of filtering blood, or transplantation.ĭr. Kidney failure, also known as renal failure, occurs when the kidneys are no longer able to perform their job of filtering and cleaning blood, causing waste and toxins to accumulate in the body. I prefer to wait the seven years,' because I don't want my mom undergoing this kind of surgery." Everything is going to be fine,'" Santiago said. "She would tell me, 'I want to give you the kidney. So when it came time for Santiago to need a transplant, she wanted to try again to be a living organ donor. Maria saw firsthand through her brother Medardo what could happen to a person who had to wait too long for a new kidney, and she feared Santiago would face the same fate. "When doctors told them the result that my mother wasn't matched with him, it was very sad for both," Santiago said. He was 24 years old at the time, just like Santiago. But they weren't a match, and Medardo died waiting on a kidney transplant. Decades prior, 15-year-old Maria had tried to donate one of her kidneys to her brother Medardo, whose kidneys were failing. Maria's thoughts returned to one of her darkest childhood memories. But due to a shortage of available donors, doctors estimated it would be seven years before a kidney became available. The medications that her eldest son, 24-year-old Santiago Castro Camacho, was taking to keep his kidneys functioning had stopped working, and he was forced to go on dialysis.Ī kidney transplant was the best option for Santiago's long-term health, and he was placed on a waiting list for a new organ. This will be tougher on her - she can’t have the normal vaccines healthy kids can.Two years ago was the worst Mother's Day of Maria Castro Camacho's life. Because she’s on immunosuppression she can pick up illnesses. The medication has to be finely balanced. It would interact with all the medication she’s on, potentially cause kidney failure. She was on iron and steroids (which wears down tooth enamel). She will be on immunosuppression (drugs) indefinitely. “Scar tissue develops - you see yellow in her eyes and wonder if the whole liver thing is starting again. “She has had a couple of more surgeries,” Kevin Fugate said. She’s an active little girl with a quick smile, but that’s not to say the past seven years have been easy. Vivi, who will turn eight in July, is a second-grader at St. The transplant team worked all night and completed the surgery on Christmas Day. The call came barely a month later, on Christmas Eve. They were put on standby and told it could be days, weeks or even months before a match became available. A UMMC gastroenterologist recommended a liver transplant, and the family went to the University of Alabama Birmingham for paperwork and evaluations. A month later Vivi couldn’t keep food or medicine down and slept poorly. When Vivi was diagnosed, (her liver) was too far gone to recover - the Kasai procedure failed.” But if it didn’t, then you put them on the list. “The hope is that the liver will regenerate. “It takes place before you are put on the transplant list,” Melissa Fugate said. The first option was the Kasai procedure, which involves removing the blocked bile ducts and gallbladder and replacing them with a segment the child’s own small intestine. ![]() He sent us to University of Mississippi Medical Center for more lab work.”Īt eight weeks, Vivi Fugate was diagnosed with Biliary Atresia, a life-threatening condition in infants in which the bile ducts inside or outside the liver do not have normal openings. “He realized the liver was a whole lot hotter than it should have been. “The doctor did a routine exam, touched her belly,” Kevin Fugate said. The skin color didn’t make me think anything was wrong. “No reason to suspect anything was wrong. “She was actually thriving and a healthy child as far as we could tell,” Melissa Fugate said. Melissa and Kevin Fugate of Ridgeland were told something was wrong with their daughter, Vivian Maria, when the infant went for her first checkup at two weeks. Watch Video: A mother's story: 2 miracles in a matter of weeks
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