CanadianCindyB

Today we met with the liver transplant team at Sick Kids, and learned the following. 1) The surgeon has no conditions on minimum age or weight.  As soon as a liver is available, either cadaver liver or living donor liver, he will do the surgery.  This was probably the most surprising piece of information for us, since we assumed there would be a minimum age/weight or both.  He said if we had a living donor ready the day baby was born, he would perform the surgery that day. A living donor is someone (related or unrelated) who donates (via surgery) a part of their liver to be transplanted.  The donor's liver regenerates and grows back into a full liver...it's the only organ that will regenerate.  Pretty cool, eh? 2) Having a living donor for the day of the birth is nearly impossible because they do a maximum of a 15:1 weight ratio for donor to baby.  My previous two pregnancies have resulted in babies that were less than 6.5 lbs.  At 6.5 lbs for baby, the adult donor (18 ye

We had a long meeting this week with metabolic genetics. We were not originally sure if the hospital would be willing to treat baby's OTC (ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency) or not.  I wouldn't have been surprised if they had said "Sorry, but this is beyond the scope of our abilities." However, they are optimistic (much more so than we are) that they can treat baby.  It requires a LOT of work, and co-ordination between numerous departments of a number of different hospitals.  Since I know we have many people interested in how this will work, I will try to outline what we know so far.  We will know more specific details later, as we have not yet met with the transplant team, and they will answer many questions regarding transplant at that point. 1) Ideally the doctors would have me deliver by planned c-section, so that they will be ready and prepared for us and baby with a known time of arrival, but I have decided against this for a combination of reasons.  It&