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In the Loop: 6 transplants in 6 days
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Sunday: Heart transplant
Monday: Combined double lung and liver transplant
Tuesday and Wednesday: One 12-hour left ventricular assist device procedure each day
Thursday: Two lung transplants and a heart transplant
Friday: Lung transplant
What you're reading is the surgical schedule of the cardiothoracic transplant team at Mayo Clinic's Rochester campus for one week in May. For those of you keeping score, that's six organ transplants in six days — including the first-ever combined bilateral lung and liver transplant performed at Mayo Clinic. The team also sprinkled in two left ventricular assist device placements for good measure.
All told, it added up to a record-setting week of life-saving proportions for our cardiothoracic colleagues. Richard Daly, M.D., who oversees it all as director of Mayo's heart and lung transplant service in Rochester, tells us it was far from a typical week. "We've never had a week like that," he says. "For the most part, our transplant volume is totally random. Each one comes along unpredictably. But that week we just kept getting donor organ offers that we thought would work for other patients so we just kept going."
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This story originally appeared on the In the Loop blog.
