CARACAS, Venezuela — Clutching a tiny Bible, Gilda Velasquez leans over her son as he falls asleep with the help of a powerful sedative and a catchy cartoon jingle playing on a hand-held TV.
“Remember, you’re a Christian, you’re a Christian,” she repeats amid her tears to Yin Carlos as orderlies wheel the 6-year-old into the operating room, where he will get a new liver.
For any family touched by liver disease, an organ transplant can be a second chance at life. But the procedure is practically a miracle in Venezuela, where an economic crisis makes even needles and acetaminophen scarce.
Yin is benefiting from the efforts of a U.S.-based surgeon and his counterpart in Caracas who have helped save dozens of Venezuelan children with failing livers. The doctors now hope to replicate their success in such a challenging environment as Venezuela and assist hundreds of boys and girls from other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean where pediatric transplants are unavailable.
Dr. Tomoaki Kato of New York’s Columbia University Medical Center began performing the transplants in Venezuela a decade ago after he was contacted by Dr. Pedro Rivas Vetencourt, a surgeon at Caracas’ Policlinica Metropolitana.
The Japanese-born physician says that back then he couldn’t even locate Venezuela on a map. But he and Rivas Vetencourt have now performed 50 pediatric transplants with living donors in the South American country, gradually building a large team of medical professionals.
With live-donor transplants, surgeons remove a recipient’s diseased liver and replace it with part of the donor’s healthy organ. Both the donor’s liver and the donated section of organ subsequently grow to full size.
Kato and Rivas Vetencourt say they have a one-year survival rate of over 90 percent for the procedure they perform at Policlinica Metropolitana, which is similar to outcomes in the U.S. After that, the risk of infection or complications falls dramatically and most recipients go on to lead healthy, long lives.
The socialist government provides 30 percent of the funding for the transplant program. Philanthropy, medical insurance and the patient’s family pay for the rest of the procedure, which costs roughly $20,000 at the weakest of Venezuela’s three official exchange rates, including a steep discount by the surgeons. Yin’s family didn’t have to pay a cent because the father’s employer picked up the remainder of the bill.
Once the surgery was underway, about a dozen medical professionals led by Rivas Vetencourt extracted the child’s mottled liver while Kato, heading a similar team, spliced a 400-gram (almost 1 pound) portion of his father’s healthy organ.
Yin, who was discharged from the hospital this week, is expected to make a full recovery.
He’ll spend the next three months convalescing with his family in Caracas, wearing a surgical mask to guard against infection. While shy as ever — his family jokes he should’ve had a tongue transplant — he’s smiling more, and the whites of his eyes have returned to their natural color, a sign of a healthy liver.
