I love love love…
…this story, in which two young people who met when one donated a portion of his liver to the other ended up falling in love and are engaged to marry. There’s a video at the link, but it can’t be embedded, so you’ll have to go there to watch it:
The two underwent grueling surgeries in March that took over eight hours. Doctors removed 55 percent of Dempsey’s liver. The recovery process took about two months for both Krueger and Dempsey. During the process they realized they were falling in love with each other.
“If wasn’t for this person, I wouldn’t have made it to Christmas,” Krueger said. “[Dempsey] was a selfless and brave person who was perfectly healthy and didn’t know me before this.”
By the way—not to take anything away from the noble gesture of the man who made the donation, but a healthy liver will ordinarily regenerate after such a procedure. So it’s a physical manifestation of the idea that in love, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He not only gets a new love, he gets a partly new liver, and she gets a wholly new one.
Donation of liver for transplant has a mortality rate of 1 in 500 or 0.2%.
Death of a donor made news in Boston two years ago.
Five year survival after receiving liver transplant is about 80%.
All daunting.
I wish them well.
I have a friend who was diagnosed with “inoperable” liver cancer last year. The cancer was so wrapped around her portal vein that no doctor would touch it. She kept looking and found a surgeon at Johns Hopkins who thought he could save her. He removed over 3/4 of her liver – well over the “allowable” limit, and somehow she managed to survive. Within two months, her liver had regenerated to its normal size and today she is still cancer free. I hate it when, after a skilled surgeon saves a patient against all odds, the family says “Thank God!”. In this case it’s hard not to, though.
snopercod:
That’s great!
snopercod:
we will pray for her 2016.
Think about the complexity of liver regeneration.The highly organized proliferation of hepatocytes (the liver cells, full of all sorts of complex biochemical functions), arteries, veins, bile ducts, all contained within a regenerated liver capsule. Done in two months!
It’s like regenerating an obliterated city, streets, wires, sewers, raingutters, houses full of families, buses and cars, airports and airplanes, cops, hospitals, etc., all in just the right places.
Nah, that’s not God, not Intelligent design. It’s just evolution.
snopercod,
Wow! Thanks for sharing that amazing story!
neo-neocon,
Thanks for sharing this one!
Wow, what a guy has to go through sometimes to get a date…
@snopercod
A Christian thanks both God who enabled the surgeon with skill and technology and the surgeon who made the effort.
We are all God’s creatures and we live in His world.