Organ donors create Petah Tikva ‘transplant marathon’

Families of 3 people who died in the last few days bring new hopes of life and health to four children and several adults.

By JUDY SIEGEL ITZKOVICH
LUNG RECIPIENT Esther Shapira at hospital 311 (photo credit: The Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus)
LUNG RECIPIENT Esther Shapira at hospital 311
(photo credit: The Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus)
The families of three people who died in the last few days, including a five-and-a-half-year-old girl who drowned in Lake Kinneret, brought new hopes of life and health to four children and several adults.
All the families agreed to the organ donations within three hours.
Doctors at Ha’emek Medical Center in Afula were unable to save Mika Borin who suffered from a lower-brain death. Her parents quickly agreed to donate her organs to save others.
Her heart and lungs were transplanted into a nine-year-old boy at Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva.
Her liver was donated in the same hospital to a 17-year-old girl, while one kidney went to a 15-year-old girl and the second to a 19-year-old woman at the Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus.
In addition, her two corneas will restore the vision of two patients at Ha’emek later this week.
The other donations resulted after the deaths of a 57-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman, both of whom suffered strokes.
Their families donated their two pairs of lungs to four adults. All the operations were performed at Beilinson.
Esther Shapira – a 61-year-old woman from Haifa who suffered from emphysema, a disease that primarily causes shortness of breath – said she was amazed to get an urgent evening call from lung institute head Prof.
Mordechai Kremer, who asked how she was feeling. Then he told her that a lung had become available.
Another recipient was a man suffering from silicosis whose lung function was down to only about a quarter of what it was when he was healthy, thus requiring him to have an urgent lung transplant.
Zahava Primo, 64, of Oranit, who had two lungs that were filled with scars, received a single lung transplant.
From the beginning of this year, an impressive 28 lungs were transplanted, making Beilinson’s total 372. The multitude of organ donations created complex logistics at Beilinson, which had to conduct the large number of transplants almost simultaneously.


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