NEVER SAY CAN’T REMARKABLE PERSON INSPIRES GIFTS TO TRANSPLANT CHAIR Can’t was absent from Burt Keenan’s lexicon. When the businessman and competitive sailor was sent home by another hospital in 2005 after being told there was no hope for his failing cancerous liver, he searched for a different answer. “Most people would have given up, but that wasn’t Burt Keenan,” says Al Gonsoulin, Mr. Keenan’s close friend. “Not everybody can do what he did. He was so persistent. He didn’t really know the definition of can’t. It wasn’t in his vocabulary.”
Burt Keenan
20
Houston Methodist Hospital Foundation
Mr. Keenan found his answer — and a second chance at life — through a 2008 liver transplantation that marked one of the first transplants for his form of liver cancer, intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma. Mr. Keenan received his transplant at UCLA, where Dr. R. Mark Ghobrial started his career. The physician’s practice moved, as did the patient’s care, to Houston Methodist in March 2008, where Dr. Ghobrial currently serves
