Healthwatch - Transplant mistake patient
KG
Duke University Hospital, where she mistakenly received organs with a
different blood type during a heart-lung transplant operation
Jesica Santillan, 17, was listed in critical condition Tuesday, and the
hospital was working to get transplanted organs for her, said Richard Puff,
a Duke hospital spokesman.
Puff said he could not speculate on how much time the teen has to live.
Jesica received the transplant February 7, according to a hospital
statement, which said the error was the "result of a blood type mismatch."
"Every effort is being made to save Jesica's life," said Dr. William
Fulkerson, the hospital's chief executive officer.
"Our primary concern has always been for Jesica and her family. This was a
tragic error, and we accept responsibility for our part," Fulkerson said.
"This is an especially sad situation since we intended this operation to
save the life of a girl whose prognosis was grave. Jesica continues to
remain at the top of the national organ donation list."
Anne Paschke, spokeswoman at United Network for Organ Sharing, said there
are critical shortages of organ donors through the United States and finding
a donor for a heart-lung procedure is difficult.
UNOS administers the nation's only organ procurement and transplantation
network.
Paschke said according to the latest statistics only 55 heart-lung
transplants took place nationwide in 2001 and 2002, and 197 people were on
the waiting list for the procedure as of February 7.
Jesica, whose family moved to the United States so she could get the
transplant, suffered from a heart deformity that affected her lungs,
according to The Associated Press. After a three-year wait, she received a
transplant with a heart and lungs flown from Boston, Massachusetts, to
Durham 10 days ago.
The organs were sent with paperwork correctly listing the donor's blood
type, said Sean Fitzpatrick of the New England Organ Bank, which sent the
organs, the AP reported. Despite the paperwork, the girl, who has type
O-positive blood, received the type A organs.
Fulkerson said the mix-up was the first such error after thousands of
"successful organ transplants" at the facility.
He said the hospital was implementing additional safeguards to ensure such
an error doesn't happen again.
Shirley
KG wrote:
Durham is just a few miles from me. They said on the news tonight that she has
just a couple more days of life left...each second without a new transplant
brings her closer to where she was before the transplant..She is such a pretty
young girl for such a tragedy to happen to.....I wonder how many lawyers are
hearing Ka-chink Ka-chink of money.....
Fata Morgana
>DURHAM, North Carolina -- A Mexican teenager is fighting for her life at
>Duke University Hospital, where she mistakenly received organs with a
>different blood type during a heart-lung transplant operation
I read it and I couldn't believe it, I mean, we are human and we make
mistakes, but there should be strict procedures and ways to avoid a
mistake like this, it is just not acceptable. Or I may say "enforced"
instead, because I know that those procedures exist. And probably, two
patients will die: this poor girl and another anonymous patient
waiting for those organs that were right for him/her.
My thoughts are with them, and also with the family, all dreams and
hopes shattered now. Lawsuit will follow, but all the money in the
world can't undo that mistake.
Cheers,
Fata Morgana
Brigid Nelson
> On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 20:32:47 -0500, "KG" <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
>
>>DURHAM, North Carolina -- A Mexican teenager is fighting for her life at
>>Duke University Hospital, where she mistakenly received organs with a
>>different blood type during a heart-lung transplant operation
>
own and that she has a 50% chance for survival. They were really
downplaying the mistake, saying only that she had received organs of the
wrong blood type.
brigid
David Carson
The report I heard was that the girl is type O and the donor was type
A. They told us in high school that was a bad combination.
David Carson
--
Why do you seek the living among the dead? -- Luke 24:5
Who's Alive and Who's Dead
http://www.whosaliveandwhosdead.com
Shirley
KG wrote:
They just announced on tv that sometime during the night she had her second
transplant operation...she is still on the respirator, but her heart is beating
on its own. She has been listed in critical condition (normal procedures they
stated) and has a 50/50 chance of survival. Her parents said she has beaten the
odds so far and are they optimistically hopeful....
Kara
Jesica Santillan's newest heart was beating on its own Thursday after
her second heart-lung transplant, supporters said, almost two weeks
after she was mistakenly given incompatible organs that nearly cost her
life.
Jesica, who has type O-positive blood, was given a heart and lungs from
a donor with type A blood in a transplant Feb. 7 at Duke University
Hospital. Her condition steadily deteriorated as her body rejected the
new organs.
A second set of organs was located late Wednesday and transplanted into
Jesica in a four-hour operation Thursday morning, hospital spokesman
Jeffrey Molter said.
Renee McCormick, spokeswoman for a charity raising money for Jesica's
care, said her heart was beating on its own afterward. Molter said she
was still breathing with the help of a ventilator and was in critical
condition, which is standard in such cases.
"This is a very serious surgery," Molter said. "We are hopeful that
these organs will support her."
The procedure has a 50-50 success rate, said Mack Mahoney, a leader in
fund-raising efforts to pay for the girl's medical care.
"So far, so good," McCormick said. "Her parents feel some relief right
now. Everyone is incredibly hopeful and we're just so pleased, so
thankful."
Family supporters said they had no information about the donor of the
second set of organs. "Hopefully, the donor family will come forward and
we can get these families reunited at some point in time," McCormick
said.
Lloyd Jordan of Carolina Donor Services said the donor family had
requested anonymity. He said the donation was not "directed" that is,
the family did not specifically request that the organs be given to
Jesica.
"We consider all donors and their families to be heroes," Jordan said.
"These are the people who make the gift of life possible."
Jesica, who is from a small town near Guadalajara, Mexico, needed a
transplant because a heart deformity kept her lungs from getting oxygen
into her blood. Doctors said she would have died within six months
without it.
The fact that a new set of compatible organs became available as Jesica
neared death was "an amazingly good thing," Molter said. He noted that
80 percent of people awaiting transplants die before organs can be
found.
"I think the word is getting out about organ donations. And in some
ways, I think Jesica is a very lucky little girl," he said.
Heart-lung transplants have been routine since the mid-1980s. About 70
percent of recipients survive at least one year, and 40 percent are
still alive after five years. Common causes of death include failure of
the transplanted organs and lung inflammation.
Jesica was not out of the woods after Thursday's operation. She suffered
kidney damage and may have brain damage or paralysis from the machines
used to keep her alive in the two weeks after the first transplant,
Mahoney said.
"We'll have to deal with those if they occur," he said.
Dr. James Jaggers, lead surgeon on the first transplant, performed the
second operation Thursday, and Mahoney said he doesn't blame the doctor
for the failure of the first.
"We have faith in the surgeon," he said. "We feel there was a grave
mistake made. We do not question his skill as a surgeon."
Molter said several times that Duke acknowledges its mistake.
"We do apologize again for the blood type mismatch," he said. "That did
in fact make her condition worse."
Jaggers said Wednesday he believed appropriate checks were made before
the first set of organs was offered to the girl. After that surgery, the
hospital added another level of verification for organ compatibility,
and Molter said the new procedures were followed before Thursday's
surgery.
A spokeswoman for the United Network for Organ Sharing, which matches
organs and recipients, said her organization has asked Duke, along with
the two organ procurement agencies that helped arrange the donation, to
draft written accounts of the events leading to Jesica's transplant
surgery.
The Richmond, Va.-based UNOS will review Duke's written accounts, along
with those from the organ procurement agencies, and make a private
determination about the sequence of events. Spokeswoman Anne Paschke
said recommendations are made for corrective action, not punishment.
Duke must also answer to the agency that accredits hospitals, which
investigates unusual deaths that might signal a problem with the
hospital's system.
Those probes are likely to take several weeks.
- Kara -
Cpl. O'Reilly
<bigd...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> They just announced on tv that sometime during the night she had her
> second transplant operation...she is still on the respirator, but her
> heart is beating on its own. She has been listed in critical
> condition (normal procedures they stated) and has a 50/50 chance of
> survival. Her parents said she has beaten the odds so far and are
> they optimistically hopeful....
The fucking idiot on the morning news here smiled like the brain-dead
dumbo that she is and said, "People are saying it's a miracle." I am
so sick of twits saying things like that. A miracle is an event that
defies nature. If the poor kid suddenly grew a new heart and set of
lungs, THAT would be a miracle.
What we have here is a monumental fuckup by one human that a group of
other humans is trying to correct. They are doing so by bringing
skill, luck, and a hell of a lot of education and hard work to the
task. I hope the little girl makes it, because she deserves a lot
better than she's been getting. As for divine intervention, maybe that
happens, maybe not, but I don't need a fucking news jerk to preach to
me about it.
It would be a miracle if they came up with a news person who knew what
they were doing.
Kara
>the first set of transplanted organs?
>Is/was it still possible to transplant them
>into another patient (I assume not, but
>don't know) or will someone who
>desperately needed them die because of
>this error?
There was an NPR broadcast about this particular mismatch, and others --
this wasn't the first -- and you can hear an informative audio that
answers some questions.
There would be too many variables to make it possible to determine
whether or not another person who had been able to use these particular
ones actually died as a direct result of "this error" (rather difficult
to give it an apt term, so I borrowed the previous one).
If you want to hear it, go to
http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=1169224 for your
choice of audio format.
- Kara -
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, Terry del Fuego <t_del...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
> Does anyone know what happened to the first set of transplanted
> organs? Is/was it still possible to transplant them into another
> patient (I assume not, but don't know) or will someone who
> desperately needed them die because of this error?
My theory about this is that the doctors and hospital management
claimed she was a good candidate for the second transplant operation,
even though they knew it was probably hopeless. (Two transplant
surgeries in the space of a week? Right.) The motivation for doing
so is obvious -- they had to be seen to do *something* as a PR
damage-control move, even if the medically ethical thing to do would
have been to write her off.
I know that sounds cold, but that's how transplant priority lists
work. I can promise you that your perspective would be different if
you were the family of the poor bastard who *was* a good candidate,
but missed out on that heart just so the doctors who fucked this one
up could try to mitigate the increase in their malpractice insurance
premiums a little.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone disagrees with any statement I make, I
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / bal...@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it. -T. Lehrer
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