The teenager who made medical history to save her mother’s life

When she was just 19 years old, Aliana Deveza organized and underwent a historic operation to save her mother’s life.

He convinced a hospital to do the first organ exchange in the United States, an intervention in which different organs were exchanged between pairs of unrelated donors.

“The first thing I asked when I woke up was how my mom was, is she okay? Did you make it? I wasn’t really worried about myself anymore, I was just concentrating on getting over the pain I felt. Only after hearing that everyone had made it, I was able to breathe again, “he says.

When Aliana talks about “everyone else”, she is not just talking about her and her mother, because two other women – some sisters – had also undergone surgery.

multiple donation

One of Aliana’s organs would go to one of the sisters and one of the other sister’s kidneys would go to Aliana’s mother.

Two lives were being saved, with two people donating organs to strangers to save a member of their family.

The operation was the result of two years of hard work that paid off.

Aliana had saved her mother Erosalyn from years of kidney dialysis, illness, and possibly an early death., and a complete stranger would live a new life.

Kidneys are one of the few organs that a living person can donate to another, since most of us are born with two but only need one to live.

However, people who need a kidney can’t always take one from someone they love, even if that person is willing to give it to them.

In 2019, around 150,000 organs were transplanted worldwide, a small fraction of the total number of people who need a new one.

Increasing the number of donors

Alvin Roth was recognized with the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012 for his work in devising a system to help more people donate and receive kidneys.

“Unlike many organs, it is possible for someone to give a kidney to someone they love and save their life,” he explains.

“But sometimes they can’t take your kidney even though you’re healthy enough to give one. And maybe I am the donor in a similar case. I would love to give a kidney to someone I love, but I can’t. But maybe my kidney will work for your patient and your kidney will work for my patient. That is the simplest type of kidney exchange where two pairs of donors come together and each gets a compatible kidney from the other patients,” he explains.

The work of Alvin Roth and his colleagues resulted in a system that has been able to increase the number of kidney exchanges, thus now saving thousands of lives each year.

But these organ swaps are not yet legal everywhere.

In Germany, for example, you can only give an organ directly to someone in your immediate family. This is so because there is concern that vulnerable people may be tempted to sell an organ for money.

In this type of transplant, not only pairs of people participate. In some cases, chains of people have joined together to maximize the number of compatible kidneys.

In one case, 70 different people got together so that 35 donors gave their kidneys to 35 strangers. so that others could have a new chance in life.

kidney for liver

Aliana was unable to donate her kidney to her mother because the doctors feared that her mother’s kidney problems could be hereditary, so Aliana could have them too.

Despite this, she still wanted to help her mother get a new kidney, but time was running out, so she started doing some research and discovered that it might be possible to swap part of a liver for a kidney.

“I started researching the type of organs that can be donated while a person is still alive, and liver was the most common answer.”

Aliana did not know that this was only a theoretical possibility and was not a normal operation. He started calling hospitals to see if he could donate part of his liver to someone in exchange for a kidney for his mother.

She assures that in some hospitals they did not understand what she meant: “Some hospitals that transferred my call to the morgue, because they did not know what I was talking about.”

Finally, he got the right person for the job: John Roberts, a surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco.

“He did not dismiss my idea. I was just a 19-year-old girl, and I didn’t know if I sounded crazy. My family was against it because they didn’t want me to put myself in danger,” she says.

With the help of the hospital they found the two sisters who would form a couple with Aliana and her mother. One of the sisters would get part of Aliana’s liver and Aliana’s mother would receive a new kidney from the other sister..

Aliana does not regret it. So why do you think more people aren’t doing the same as her?

“I think people are walking away from the idea of ​​organ donation out of fear. These are important operations, there are definitely a lot of risks, but understanding it and going through the process with a team that will be there for you during the process is what helps”, he says.