Back from the grave: A liver transplant patient’s tale

Rene Godinez, a 46-year-old businessman, was vacationing with his family in Hawaii in July 2005 when, to his astonishment, his eyes suddenly turned yellow and his skin, dark purple.

Alarmed, he rushed himself to the nearest hospital where he was told that his liver was barely functioning. He was suffering from acute liver failure.

He cut his vacation short and flew back to the Philippines, went directly to his doctor who, three weeks earlier, had told him that he was suffering from slight liver cirrhosis without giving any reason how he got it.

Upon seeing him that day, however, Godinez said his doctor told him he needed nothing short of a miracle to live for another month. He was written off as dead.

Refusing to accept the prognosis, Godinez and his wife weighed their options and started making calls until a friend told them about Gleneagles Hospital in Singapore, which was reported to have been successfully performing liver transplants for patients with end-stage liver diseases.

The couple wasted no time and got in touch with Dr. Tan Kai Chah, the consultant surgeon at Gleneagles and a world pioneer in living donor liver transplant or LDLT. Over the phone, Godinez asked Tan if he could save him.

"If you come to Singapore, yes I can save you," Godinez quoted Tan as telling him.

Pleasantly surprised by Tan’s confidence and optimism, Godinez and his wife were in Singapore in two days, and Godinez was thoroughly examined by Gleneagle’s LDLT team of experts.

They next scouted for a donor, and Godinez’ brother, who was working in Bangkok, Thailand, agreed to donate half of his liver to his ailing sibling.

"I am literally back from the grave," a beaming Godinez told journalists on the sidelines of the 16th Conference of the Asia Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver early this month in Manila, where Tan was one of the invited speakers.

"It was a life-changing experience," he said.

Godinez said he and Tan’s other former patients from the Philippines are planning to organize an advocacy campaign to make Filipinos aware that there is a good chance of survival for those who are suffering from end-stage liver diseases such as cancer and cirrhosis and who like them had been told that theirs were hopeless cases.

"Not to be given any option, that is simply very cruel," Godinez said of his near-death experience.

"Why are we being kept in the dark about these options when these are matters of life and death?" referring to the lack of information about LDLT in the Philippines.

For his part, Tan said Filipino doctors should be more open to LDLT since the scarcity of livers from cadaveric donors for transplants makes local patients wait hopelessly – and most likely in vain.

Tan has performed more than 800 liver transplant operations in the United Kingdom and in Southeast Asia, and many were pioneering procedures such as the first "split-liver" transplant operation where the donor graft was divided and transplanted to two recipients.

During his tenure as senior liver transplant surgeon at London’s King’s College Hospital from 1986 to 1994, Tan trained 26 surgeons in hepatobiliary and liver transplant surgery.

He also advised and helped implement the Irish National Liver Transplant Program in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, and was a consultant surgeon at the National University Hospital in Singapore.

It was at Gleneagles Hospital where Tan performed the first successful adult-adult living donor liver transplant in Southeast Asia.

In the Philippines, the Parkway Group Healthcare has opened its Medical Referral Center at the Medical Plaza Makati (tel. nos. 751-8225 and 27).

The referral center is designed to help local patients access the right specialist expertise, personalized patient care and cutting-edge technology available at all Parkway hospitals in Singapore and elsewhere in Asia.

The center offers free services in connecting patients to relevant medical services in real-time.

"We believe that Filipino patients deserve world-class and affordable treatment, without having to go through that hassle of securing visas and other stringent requirements. Our office here can even arrange to airlift patients to Singapore should such a need arises," said Keely Low, Parkway’s marketing and country manager in the Philippines.