A girl was saved a few days ago with a super-urgent liver transplant for fulminant liver failure from heat stroke. The operation was performed at the Molinette hospital of the Città della Salute in Turin. “The girl, 26 years old, resident in the Alba area, was taken ill near her home in the countryside during a scorching sunny morning in this very hot summer. Found unconscious by her family, she was rushed to the hospital in Verduno – the university hospital company reconstructs – The first internal body temperature measured in the emergency room was 41 degrees, proving the so-called ‘heat stroke’. The resuscitation doctors immediately intubated her and subjected her to cooling with ice and cold liquids intravenously. The timely treatment made it possible to stabilize the young patient’s vital functions and prevent the lethal progression towards multi-organ failure. However, starting from the day after the acute event, the liver situation progressively worsened, very quickly configuring a picture of severe liver failure in fulminant evolution”.
Less than 4 days after the transplant, the patient’s conditions are rapidly improving and the girl is gradually waking up in intensive care. “This episode shows how this hot summer does not stop the donation network of Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta, capable of responding to the needs of care and saving the lives of patients on the waiting list, even urgent ones, for a transplant”, highlights the Aou. “It is a life saved that confirms for the umpteenth time the very high level of professionals and the excellent organizational machine of the Città della Salute of Turin. The effective collaboration with the other Piedmont hospitals has allowed us to network and perform a real miracle”, said Giovanni La Valle, general manager of the company.
“Despite the tragedy of the situation, there was a favorable temporal coincidence that the surgical team of the Turin center was engaged in an organ harvesting operation at an important Piedmont hospital, thanks to the direction of the Regional Transplant Center – the AOU reports in a note – Doctor Damiano Patrono was in fact completing a delicate operation to divide the liver of a donor into two parts (the so-called ‘split liver’), so that the left part of the liver (smaller) could be transplanted into a pediatric recipient in another Italian transplant center and the right part (larger) could be transplanted into an adult recipient in Turin. As luck would have it, the ‘right split’ liver was perfectly compatible with the girl’s needs and could therefore be assigned to her”.
The very serious patient was thus able to be taken to the operating room for transplant with maximum promptness, that is, less than 2 hours after being placed on the national super-urgent waiting list. The highly complex transplant lasted about 8 hours and was technically successful.
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