A Father's Gift Of Life

A Father Rejoins His Son After Donating A Portion Of His Liver To Help The Baby Overcome A Fatal Liver Disease.

November 28, 1997|By Bonnie Miller Rubin and Stephanie Banchero, Tribune Staff Writers.

Anthony Palmisano leaned over the hospital bed, reached across the tangle of tubes and monitors and cupped his hand around the tiny head of his 4-month-old son.

Michael Palmisano rolled his head toward his father, batted his deep black eyelashes and let out a cry as soft as a whisper.

"It's OK, you'll feel better soon," Palmisano said in a soothing voice. "Daddy's here."

Daddy's arrival at Michael's bedside Thursday was nothing short of a miracle. Just 12 hours earlier, Anthony Palmisano was lying in his own hospital bed recovering from surgery.

But as a somewhat pale and weak Palmisano soothed Michael to sleep at Children's Memorial Hospital, he was sharing more than the Thanksgiving holiday with his only son; he was sharing his life.

Earlier this week, Palmisano donated a portion of his liver to save his son's life.

Michael Palmisano was born with biliary atresia, a fatal disease that blocks the function of the bile ducts. Doctors at Children's Memorial performed delicate transplant surgery on the baby, who received a portion of the liver of his father, a patient at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

The two were reunited for the first time Thanksgiving Day.

"I'm so happy to be here, but I wish I could pick him up and give him a hug," Palmisano said, eying the jumble of tubes pumping a half-dozen medications into his son's frail body. "Maybe tomorrow."

Tomorrow cannot come quick enough for Lisa Palmisano, Michael's mother and Anthony's wife. The 32-year-old Carol Stream mother spent three days shuttling between two hospitals.

"I wish I could be in two places at once," she said the day of the transplant. "This is very, very tough."

On Monday, the day of the transplant, Lisa Palmisano was camped in Children's Memorial's waiting room, surrounded by family and friends, who helped her pass the achingly slow hours with equal parts of Fannie May and Yahtzee.

Doctors removed a portion of Anthony Palmisano's liver at 8 a.m. At noon, it was rushed by ambulance to Children's Memorial, where a surgical team waited for the healthy organ and transplanted it into Michael, a procedure that took another eight hours.

While doctors performed the delicate surgery, Lisa Palmisano and friends and family waited for updates from the operating room. Every time the phone rang, someone leapt for it like a lovesick teenager.

While she waited, Lisa Palmisano reflected on this strange journey that brought her to Children's Memorial, where she and her husband have slept for 35 of the last 90 days.

Four months ago, she wasn't exactly sure what a liver does. Now, she bandies about terms like "bile flow" and "pic line" like a med student.

"I was a fanatic when I was pregnant," she said."I would only drink bottled water, I wouldn't take an aspirin, I didn't even have an epidural," she said, of her two-day labor and delivery.

"Whenever anyone asked if I wanted a boy or a girl, I'd say, `I don't care, as long as it's healthy.' The irony is that the one thing I truly wanted, I didn't get."

As Michael turned progressively yellower with jaundice, the Palmisanos knew that without a transplant, their baby would die.

They opted for an organ donated from a living relative, as opposed to a cadaver liver, because it is generally healthier, carries less risk of rejection and can be transplanted before the baby's condition deteriorates even further.

Anthony found out last week that he was a perfect match.

His wife said, "I told him, `I gave him birth, now you can give him life.' "

It is the 11th liver transplant done at Children's Memorial since it started performing such procedures in August. The program is headed by Dr. Peter Whitington, a member of the team that operated on toddler Alyssa Smith in 1989 at the University of Chicago.

Smith was the nation's first living-donor liver transplant patient. Today, the surgery is considered routine, with a success rate of more than 90 percent.

The liver is the only organ in the body that can regenerate itself. And while the surgery poses a small risk to the donor, it offers an important psychological edge to parents who feel powerless while waiting for a cadaver organ to become available, said Dr. Estella Alonso, a pediatric hepatologist at Children's,

"It's a way of taking control . . . and when everything is spinning, that can make a big difference in the way people cope," Alonso said. "Donors may not always understand the technical stuff, but they understand that they have an opportunity to be a hero to their own child, niece or nephew."

Currently, about 53,000 people are on waiting lists for transplants, up steeply from 29,000 in 1992. Nearly 4,000 people died while waiting for an organ in 1996 alone.

However, while most hospitals have donors and recipients under the same roof, Children's Memorial is one of the few medical centers to opt for two separate venues.