MOM DOING BETTER AFTER TRANSPLANT

Complications Hit After Giving Part Of Liver To Daughter

Leisa Frye begged the doctors to take part of her liver and give it
to her 17-year-old daughter, who was rapidly dying of liver failure
after she mistakenly ate poisonous mushrooms. The first set of
doctors said it wasn't an option.

Brittany would have to stay on a waiting list. The second set, the
liver transplant team at the Medical University of South Carolina,
said they could do it but warned it entailed risks. "I said I didn't
care. My main risk was losing my daughter," Frye said Thursday
afternoon, just before she checked out of MUSC Medical Center.
Brittany, who was released earlier this week, is doing well after the
July 7 transplant. "I respect my life a lot more now," the Sumter
high school graduate said. "I appreciate everything a lot more." She
spent three days in a coma, and her mother had life-threatening
complications after giving the right lobe of her liver. Brittany
said, "I feel bad that she had to go through all this and the
complications, but if she had to do it again, she probably would."
Her mother smiled a confirmation. She never had a doubt, she said. "I
was just so scared.

I didn't have any hope that she would get a liver outside the family.

People wait days and years." About 25 percent die waiting for a donor organ.

If things go wrong in a live donor transplant, however, both the
donor and the patient can die, pointed out Dr. Kenneth D. Chavin, who
performed the surgery with Dr. Angello Lin. The roughly 11 hours of
surgery represent the fifth live liver donor transplant at MUSC, one
of less than 400 ever performed and the first due to mushroom
poisoning. Half of liver failure patients die, Chavin said, and
Brittany was declining rapidly. "We waited (for a donor organ) as
long as we could," he said. "We were on the verge of not being able
to do a transplant. Our hand was forced." Both transplant surgeries
went well, but Frye developed a blood clot in the vessel that brings
80 percent of the blood to the liver and later had internal bleeding
when a line was removed. Both complications threatened her life and
required more surgery.

Of her nearly three weeks in the hospital, Frye said, she remembers
only the last seven days. Now, mother and daughter said, they can't
wait to get home to Sumter. Frye's fiance, as well as Brittany's
brother, sister and father have been here throughout the medical
ordeal. Brittany became ill after going " 'shrooming" with friends,
gathering and eating wild mushrooms that the teens thought would make
them high. "I didn't know kids were doing it," Frye said. "Why in the
world would you eat mushrooms out of a cow paddy?" Brittany told her
mother only after she'd been treated in an emergency room, then
continued getting sicker.

Andrew Frye, her 16-year-old brother, said an unbelievable amount of
teen-agers are using mushrooms because they're free and easy to
obtain. Two friends who had been 'shrooming with her didn't get
seriously sick and presumably didn't eat poisonous mushrooms.
"They're not doing mushrooms any more. They're scared half to death,"
Brittany said. "I had a talk with another friend, and he's still
doing it." Lakewood High School, from which Brittany graduated this
year, is developing a mushroom awareness class and has asked her to
speak, she said. Had her friends also eaten poisonous mushrooms and
needed transplants, Chavin said, "Potentially three could have died
instead of our having this happy ending."