Boy receives a father's greatest gift
The birth of a child should be a joyous event. But for Shannon and Tom of downstate Illinois, that sense of exhilaration turned to apprehension just a week after the birth of their baby boy, Treyton.
Within his first 24 hours of life Treyton was jaundiced, and at his one-week checkup his levelof bilirubin, a chemical derived from the breakdown of red blood cells that is cleared by the liver, was alarmingly high. Treyton underwent additional tests at a local hospital, and was then transferred to Children's Hospital of Illinois in Peoria for treatment. There he received two exchange blood transfusions, in which a treatment called apheresis was utilized to remove his red blood cells and replace them with transfused blood, and also underwent multiple diagnostic procedures and a liver biopsy. Finally, the family received a diagnosis: biliary atresia. The condition is a chronic, progressive liver disorder that causes blockage of the bile ducts. The liver becomes damaged leading to cirrhosis and liver failure.
A procedure called the Kasai operation was performed to allow bile to drain from Treyton’s liver to his intestinal tract. Although it offered a good short-term solution, the Kasai operation is ineffective in the long-term in most cases of biliary atresia, so Shannon and Tom knew that further down the road their son would probably need a liver transplant.
Twenty years ago, most children diagnosed with biliary atresia died before the age of 2, because they were considered too small to receive a liver transplant. Today such infants are routinely transplanted with a high success rate at Children’s Memorial Hospital’s Siragusa Transplantation Center. The center includes one of the largest and most experienced pediatric liver transplant programs in the world, and its surgeons have performed more than 220 transplants.
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When Treyton was several months old, the Kasai procedure began to fail, and Shannon and Tom began to investigate pediatric hospitals with liver transplant programs. They were impressed by what they learned about Children's Memorial's liver transplant team, co-directed by Peter Whitington, MD, and Riccardo Superina, MD, who is also the head of the Division of Transplant Surgery. Whitington is the Sally Burnett Searle Professor of Pediatrics and Transplantation, and Superina is the Robert E. Schneider Chair in Transplantation.
"Although we knew that a transplant would be inevitable, the thought of what it actually meant for Treyton was frightening," says Shannon.