The gift of life that’s born from a death

Lifestyle –  Judy Murphy meets a brave young woman who received a liver transplant

Saranne Flaherty rang the Claregalway Hotel on Monday of the Galway Races in July 2011 to tell her employers that she was sick and couldn’t come in.

The 20-year-old was worried that they’d be annoyed with her for calling in sick on their busiest week of the year.  As it happened, that soon became the least of her worries. Within months she was crucially ill, waiting for a liver transplant.

Saranne, who had been diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder two years previously, had been complaining of abdominal pains over that weekend in July 2011.

Initially she reckoned it was a pulled muscle, but her doctor referred her to UHG. He was worried she might have a clot on her lung, because of the location of the pain. From UHG she was sent to Merlin Park where she spent two and a half weeks, undergoing CAT scans and MRIs to try and locate the cause of the problem.

Eventually she was told that there was a clot on the hepatic vein, leading into her liver, and it was causing a blockage – a rare condition known as Budd-Chiari syndrome. It was caused by a combination of her auto-immune condition, which results in excessive bleeding, and the contraceptive pill which she was taking for menstrual problems.

Two attempts to surgically remove the clot here in Galway failed and Saranne was told she would have to go to Dublin’s St Vincent’s Hospital, or possibly to Birmingham for further treatment.

That was late August, by which time the pain had abated. Because she didn’t display all the symptoms of the condition, and since her liver was still functioning, she was sent home. But she knew this was a temporary respite and by late October, the pain returned. In addition, her stomach started swelling up and she became very sick.

In November Saranne was sent to St Vincent’s for a non-surgical procedure known as TIPS which creates new connections to the veins serving the liver. Had it succeeded, it would have removed the need for surgery.

The procedure was delayed when she got an infection, so it didn’t take place until three weeks later. During that time, she kept hearing the specialists say that TIPS would solve her problems “if” it worked. She didn’t dwell too much on what would happen if it didn’t.

Her mother, Patricia, spent most of her time with Saranne – fortunately for her daughter, she was a nurse and understood most of what was going on. They were lucky in that Patricia is originally a Dubliner and could stay in her family home. Saranne’s father, Gerry, was also there but he found it especially tough, she recalls.

The first thing Saranne asked when she woke up after the TIPS procedure was ‘did it work?’ only to be told it hadn’t.

“There was a nurse at the end of my bed preparing her notes, so I thought this is bad,” Saranne recalls.

By now it was early December and she was very sick. Her liver and kidneys had started to fail, because all the other veins in her liver had also clotted. She was moved to Intensive Care where she was put on a dialysis machine and fed via a tube.

On the third of December, 2011, Saranne’s specialist told her she needed a liver transplant. She asked how long she’d be in hospital waiting for this and was told it could be “days, weeks or months”.

“By then I was too sick to care and I said ‘do whatever’,” she says.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.