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She’s celebrating her 50th birthday and 9th anniversary of her heart transplant

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At 26, Melody Hickman of Raleigh, North Carolina, was crestfallen. A routine physical detected a problem with her mitral valve. Fixing it required open-heart surgery.

“I knew I would have to be on a heart-lung machine, and the idea of having the incision really bothered me,” she said, noting she often wore V-neck tops. “It was a lot to digest.”

The surgery and recovery went well. Then, 14 years later, the valve needed to be replaced again. That meant a second open-heart surgery. Read more from American Heart Association News.

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Lung transplant recipients remain at high risk for severe disease, mortality from omicron variant

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Despite a lower overall mortality rate, lung transplant recipients remain at high risk for severe disease and death from the COVID-19 omicron variant compared with both the general population and other respiratory infections.

“[The omicron variant] is shown to be associated with lower severity of illness in the general population, particularly among the vaccinated, compared to the preceding variants,” Jamie Hum, DNP, lung transplant nurse practitioner in the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine and with the Lung Transplant Program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and colleagues wrote in Annals of the American Thoracic Society. Read more in Healio.

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11 Kidney Transplant Recovery Tips

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Rest, hydration, protein and light exercise all play an important role in your healing

Getting a kidney transplant gives you a new lease on life. A successful transplant gives you increased strength, stamina and energy — but while you’re recovering from surgery, you may not quite feel that way yet.

If you’re about to undergo kidney transplant surgery, here’s what you need to know about recovery. Read more from the Cleveland Clinic.

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Transplant Center reaches milestone: 5,000 kidney transplants

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(SACRAMENTO) UC Davis Health reached an institutional milestone in August, surpassing 5,000 kidney transplants performed since its first almost 37 years ago.

Established in 1985, the UC Davis Transplant Center performed 282 kidney transplants in 2021, making UC Davis Health one of  the top 10 centers in the nation  for total kidney transplants. Read more from UC Davis Health News.

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Medical Debt Makes the Sick Sicker

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— Better and broader insurance coverage is essential

Most physicians have sworn an oath to “abstain from whatever is deleterious” to our patients. Yet our medical institutions harm patients daily. They dun them for medical bills they can’t afford, often leaving them unable to pay their rent or mortgage, or buy enough to eat.

That accusation isn’t hyperbole, it’s a finding from our analysis — published this month in JAMA Network Open — of Census Bureau surveys on medical indebtedness. 
Read more in MedPage Today.

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Remdesivir-Resistant Version of COVID-19 Detected in Organ Transplant Recipients

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Recent studies have shown that patients with weakened immune systems—which enables the virus that causes COVID-19 to remain longer in the body, copy itself, and continually change—may enable the development of new, slightly different versions of the virus (variants). These people include those treated with drugs that suppress the immune system to keep it from rejecting a newly transplanted organ.

A new study led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Long Island School of Medicine shows that two people with kidney transplants who were treated with immunosuppressive drugs, and who later had a lengthy COVID-19 infection, developed a version of the virus with a genetic change (mutation) that made it resistant to the antiviral therapy remdesivir. Read more from NYU Langone Health News Hub.

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Patient receives Pacific Northwest’s first donation-after-circulatory-death heart transplant

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On Aug. 11, LifeCenter Northwest, the Organ Procurement Organization for Washington, and UW Medicine’s heart transplant team together facilitated the Pacific Northwest’s first donation-after-circulatory-death (DCD) heart transplant.

The patient, Ryan Stovall, 48, a resident of Beaver Creek, Oregon, is recovering well in Seattle. Read more from News Medical Life Sciences.

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Everything You Need to Know About Being a Living Liver Donor

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With over 105,000 people on the national transplant waiting list, it should be no surprise that organ donation is one of the most important medical procedures of our time. In 2021 alone, more than 11,800 people on the national transplant list were waiting specifically for a liver transplant.

But what does the journey of a liver transplant involve, exactly? And what does this process look like for living liver donors who make the choice to donate a part of their liver?
Read more from Healthline.

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What you need to know about COVID-19 in 2022

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As has been previously reported and most already know, the virus that causes COVID-19 changes over time. The updated COVID-19 vaccine bivalent boosters include components of the original virus strain and the Omicron variant. This updated booster is called a bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster because it is effective against two different strains of the virus

The updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters are designed to give you broad protection against COVID-19, including better protection against the Omicron variant. Read more from the National Kidney Foundation.

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