STANFORD—Gilroy tot Stella Arde received a life-saving donor liver in a delicate, four-hour surgery at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
“She woke up yesterday for the first time, opened her eyes and looked around, she is doing good,” her dad, Joe Arde, said Monday.
And by Thursday, things were even better.
“She’s a lot more awake now,” Arde said, adding doctors told him she is doing so well she might not be hospitalized as long as anticipated—and she’ll be on regular food very soon.
“She’s a champ,” Stella’s dad said.
Stella, 15 months old, suffered from progressive liver failure and a terminal illness that robbed her of oxygen and for which there is no cure. Children with the condition typically do not live more than two years, Stella’s mother, Elizabeth Arde, told the Dispatch for a February article about Stella’s search for a liver donor.
The transplant on Friday, March 27 was a big surprise to Joe, 42, and mom Elizabeth, 34, who was supposed to be the donor.
In fact, Elizabeth, who works for the City of Gilroy, had been approved as the donor and had only to donate blood, for her own surgery, before the transplant expected in late April if all went well.
Then things went better and sooner than anyone had expected.
“On Friday we got call at 6 o’clock in the morning and the doctor was calmly asking (about Stella) and then he said, ‘Well, we have a liver for you.’ My wife was like, ‘What?’ and the doctor just said ‘get here as soon as you can,’” Joe Arde said.
They did arriving at the hospital at 8:30 a.m.
“We got there before the liver did,” said Joe Arde, adding doctor’s told him in had been flown in from Atlanta, Georgia.
“Before she went into surgery she was just her happy self, she didn’t know what she was getting into, we were blowing bubbles,” the happy father said Thursday.
By 11:50 a.m. surgeons had begun the intricate procedure to remove Stella’s diseased and rapidly failing liver and replace it with the donor organ.
Four hours later, Joe and Elizabeth watch their daughter emerge from the operating theater and embraced in the long hallway—having taken perhaps the most reassuring and hopeful step since Stella was first diagnosed when she was just seven weeks old.
“As soon as they wheeled her out of the operation room her colored looked amazing, way different,” Joe said. “And her stomach was flat, that is what amazed me the most, her stomach.”
Stella had been living with an extremely swollen tummy, her body engorged with fluids her diseased liver could not filter and pass on—the distention a clear indication of late-stage liver failure.
Joe Arde said the journey to surgery came only after an up-and-down series of events that began last week when Stella placed at the bottom of the short list for a new liver—she had scored a minus 10 on candidate testing, an indication that her body’s ability to undergo and benefit from the transplant was not as good as other potential recipients, according to her father.
“The highest scores get the transplant call first,” he said.
But Stella’s transplant coordinator at Lucile Packard decided to resubmit her information and case and when it was reviewed again the number changed dramatically, she had jumped to a score of 28, high enough to be seriously considered for the procedure—but two other candidates still were ahead of her, Joe Arde recalled.
On March26, one of those two received a donor liver. Then, the other candidate ahead of Stella was found on March 27, the same day another the liver became available, to be too unstable to undergo the operation; Stella jumped to the top of the list.
“Just the day before Stella had gone from a minus 10 to 28,” Joe Arde said. “If that had not happened, she would not have gotten the liver. All the stars were aligned and this liver just fell to Stella, it was amazing.”
