Overview
- The patient, 36-year-old Elizabeth Wehrle of Iowa, received a second double-lung transplant plus a donor liver and kidney after severe chronic rejection and organ failure from cystic fibrosis.
- The thoracic team performed the lung retransplant first on the evening of March 22, and abdominal surgeons completed the liver and kidney implants hours later in a sequence that took about eight hours.
- Surgeons said the case was technically high risk because Wehrle’s 2017 lung transplant left dense chest scarring that distorted anatomy and raised the chance of bleeding and injury during reoperation.
- Northwestern used machine perfusion to keep donor organs functioning outside the body and buy time for a staged approach instead of attempting a single extremely long surgery.
- The hospital says this is the first known U.S. quadruple-organ transplant involving retransplanted lungs, one of only a handful of quadruple procedures nationally, and the patient has been discharged, is walking several miles a day, and will return home to her son.