A Transplant for Katy: Heartache and betrayal at the transplant capital of the world

In the summer of 2005, the pioneer surgeon known as the father of organ transplantation thought he’d finally found a way to the field’s Holy Grail – transplanting an organ without subjecting the patient to potentially deadly anti-rejection drugs. To test his ambitious new protocol, Dr. Thomas Starzl and his team needed ten patients. Katy Miller would be the first. Smart, beautiful and sick with an illness guaranteed to destroy her liver, Katy agreed to a transplant using part of her sister’s liver. But Starzl’s long standing dream backfired. Katy died at 21, touching off a firestorm of controversy at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. A Transplant for Katy depicts the dramatic efforts to save a star patient – and the reputation of the world’s leading transplant center, where patients from as far as Egypt and Libya came in search of a miracle. The book reveals details about the last working days of Starzl, who stopped doing surgeries in 1991 but never lost his passion for transplants. His obsession to wean patients off immunosuppression drove him to question Katy’s treatment at the hospital where he was once king and pushed him to an unlikely feud with a much younger and aggressive transplant chief, Amadeo Marcos. Starzl became so enraged about Katy’s case that he launched an unauthorized review of every single liver transplant performed by Marcos in Pittsburgh. His findings rattled administrators: serious complications in nearly 60 percent of the live-donor liver surgeries, a rate much higher than expected. As Starzl’s battle with Marcos escalated, university officials banned Starzl from setting foot on the transplant center named after him. They also hit him where it hurt: They stopped publication of his findings in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. A Transplant for Katy is the heartbreaking saga of a former homecoming queen who never realized she was expected to revolutionize medicine. It tells the story of her childhood in rural Pennsylvania, the illness that stunned her family, her two failed liver transplants, and the toll her death took on her family. The book is an emotional journey that blends the history or liver transplantation with rich characters that include a generous sister who, in a selfless act, underwent a potentially dangerous operation to give part of her liver to her beloved sister, and a determined mother who fought doctors for a second transplant when the first one failed. Written by Luis Fabregas, a medical journalist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, A Transplant for Katy is a relevant and timely story at a time when the world of medicine continues to debate the merits of live-donor liver transplants. About 30 million people in the United States have liver disease and more than 100,000 are waiting for organs on the nation’s bloated transplant wait lists. Katy’s story will show them death is often a necessary evil in the pursuit of medical perfection.