A New Liver,
A New Life By Mary Ann Littell
I (Left to right) The transplant surgeons: Andrew delaTorre, MD, Baburao Koneru, MD, Dorian Wilson, MD, and Adrian Fisher, MD
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PULSE
FALL 2003
n 1989, Karlynn Brown, a high school junior from Jersey City, went to the school nurse complaining of fatigue, fever and dizziness. She had felt ill for days, and was wearing tinted glasses so no one would see how yellow her eyes were. But the nurse wasn’t fooled. She advised the teenager to see a physician immediately: “And don’t come back to school until you do.” For Brown, thus began an odyssey that took her first to her pediatrician, next to a hepatologist, then to St. Francis Hospital in Jersey City, and finally to University Hospital in Newark, where she ultimately underwent three liver transplants. Today, she is a healthy 30 year old, newly married, with a master’s degree in social work and a rewarding job counseling middleschool students. The road back to good health was a long one for Brown. She didn’t know it at the time, but she was a pioneer, one of the first patients to receive a liver transplant at University Hospital (UH) in Newark. The program was launched in 1989 under the direction of Baburao Koneru, MD, and that year, 15 transplants were performed. Since then, the surgical team has performed more than 700 liver transplants, and the program has grown to be the 12th largest adult liver program in the nation (based on 2002 figures from the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS). “We’re the first and largest liver transplant program in the state,” says Koneru, who is also an associate professor of surgery at New Jersey Medical School (NJMS). The other program in New Jersey, a relatively new one at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden, has performed 14 transplants to date over the last three years.
JOHN EMERSON
