Multi-organ recipient, 54, celebrating a miracle
Published: February 2, 2006
Joe Walls has recovered sufficiently from a lifesaving “multivisceral transplant” that he was able to wisecrack Wednesday with some of the people who saw him through the ordeal.
“I got shortchanged,” he joked while his ice cream melted at the Kaiser Permanente’s regional office where the staff had gathered to celebrate Walls’ recovery. “They took out seven organs. I only got five back.”
Apparently, they left his sense of humor intact.
On July 4, during an operation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, surgeons removed the 54-year-old Bailey man’s spleen, gallbladder, stomach, liver, pancreas and part of his small intestines.
From a single donor, Walls received a new stomach, liver, pancreas and two parts of small intestine. He was the first Kaiser Permanente patient in Colorado to undergo the multi-organ transplant.
The University of Pittsburgh is one of four hospitals in the U.S. that perform the procedure, Kaiser Permanente officials said.
For Walls, a tree technician with a degree in biology, getting the transplant was the difference between life and death.
He started suffering from severe stomach cramps in September 2004.
“At first, I thought it was stress-related because we were in the middle of buying a house,” he recalled.
The cramps intensified, but tests were unable to determine the cause of the problem.
One Saturday in November 2004, Dr. Brownie Flesche, a Kaiser Permanente internal medicine specialist, called Walls at home to see how he was doing.
When he reported being in severe pain, she arranged to have him admitted to Exempla St. Joseph Hospital.
Doctors there discovered that a blood clotting condition had resulted in a gangrenous infection that had destroyed part of Walls’ small intestines.
He underwent several operations to remove the infected organs, but eventually, another doctor gave Walls the bad news.
He did not have enough intestines left to survive without a transplant, and his other organs were breaking down.
At first, Walls said, Kaiser Permanente balked at the procedure, concluding that he was not a good candidate. However, he appealed the decision and a second doctor decided that Walls could survive the operation.
He was transferred to Pittsburgh in January 2005, where he waited five months for a suitable donor.
Wednesday was his first chance to see many of the people who had helped him.
Flesche said it felt good to see her former patient again. “It’s a miracle,” she said.
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