Last update - 00:00 14/10/2007
Man dies after rejecting transplant but saves three other lives
By Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz Correspondent
As Guy, 30, was being prepared for urgent surgery earlier this month, his family hoped the liver transplant would save his life. Guy's liver was damaged when he became severely dehydrated during a marathon. Guy died last Thursday after his body rejected the organ. But Guy's own organs helped save the lives of three patients.
The liver that Guy received 10 days ago came from the bodies of two women who had died from strokes. Their organs went to several patients, some of whom had been waiting for a transplant for several years.
After Guy's parents and wife, who lives in Haifa, donated his organs, the surgeons at Ichilov Hospital took Guy's heart, lungs and two corneas. Guy's heart is now beating in Yaphim Reznick's chest.
Yaphim, a 59-year-old physicist who immigrated from Russia several years ago, had suffered severe heart failure, and was in critical condition. Reznick, who had settled in Ashdod, had been hospitalized in Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer for more than four months. "We were concerned that he might die before we found him a new heart," Reznick's doctor, Jay Lavi, said. "Yaphim had to be put on monitoring machines and medications all the time, just to keep him alive.
"This heart has pumped blood to three livers already," Lavi said. "First, to the original owner's liver. Then to the donated livers the owner received, and now to Yaphim's liver." Lavi said Reznick told him he couldn't remember the last time he could breath so easily.
One of Guy's lungs went to Avshalom Naveh, 62, the father of 14-year-old twin girls. "He's had breathing problems for years. Things started deteriorating; he needed an oxygen mask," said his wife Mali. "We were glued to the telephone, waiting for the hospital to call and tell us they'd found a lung for Avshalom."
The phone rang on Thursday at 5 P.M., soon after Guy drew his last breath. The operation began just a few hours later, at Beilinson Medical Center in Petah Tikva. As one team of surgeons was working on Avshalom, another was transplanting Guy's other lung into another 53-year-old lung patient.
"Avshalom's operation began at 2 A.M. and was over by 8 A.M. He is now stable and already is feeling better," his wife said Saturday. "He's still groggy, but when they tried to wake him up this morning he was already responding."
Guy's corneas went to two other patients who had been anxiously waiting the urgent call from the Health Ministry's Israel Transplant