A 28-year-old Chicago patient in need of a kidney transplant was able to watch his surgery live as part of a new awake surgery program aimed at reducing the risks associated with general anesthesia.
“Are you awake John?” Your kidney failure is cured, my friend,” said Dr. Satish Nadig, transplant surgeon and director of the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Center, to his patient to whom he recounted the operation step by step, we can see in a video shared by the medical center on Monday.
Exactly one month earlier, patient John Nicholas, 28, went under the knife for a kidney transplant after he began suffering from kidney problems at age 16 due to Crohn’s disease, CBS News reported.
But at the start of 2022, his condition would have rapidly declined, so much so that he would have quickly needed a transplant. It was his childhood friend, Pat Wise, 29, who gave him the precious organ.
It was then that the healthcare team would have approached the patient to offer him the possibility of carrying out the organ transplant without putting him to sleep, using a spinal anesthesia injection similar to that used during cesarean sections, to avoid injury. have recourse to general anesthesia.
Although this type of operation would have been done elsewhere, it was the first case of an awake organ transplant for Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, which now hopes to make the procedure more common.
“Our hope is that an awake kidney transplant can reduce some of the risks associated with general anesthesia while shortening a patient’s hospital stay,” the surgeon said in a press release. The patient was able to return home in less than 24 hours, making it essentially an outpatient procedure. »
This allows the patient to heal and return to daily routine more quickly.
For his part, the patient insisted that he felt nothing during the operation, he who was able to follow the transplant step by step, and even see his own kidney.
“At one point I asked them “when do you think you’ll start?” and they told me they were already working for a while, the patient laughed to CBS News. It was a pretty cool experience knowing what was happening in real time and being aware of the scale of what they were doing. »
According to the surgeon, the “AWAKE” program, which currently targets kidney transplant patients, could eventually extend to other types of transplants.
“This really opens a whole new door and constitutes another tool in our palette of tools for the field of transplantation,” he rejoiced, according to the American media.
