KIDNEY OP GAVE HER LIFE, BUT TOOK HER LOVEHUSBAND MADE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR WIFE
By SUSAN EDELMAN
Posted: 1:46 am
December 21, 2008
ShellyAnn King was resting in her hospital bed at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn on Oct. 27, dreaming of a new future.
In a bed beside her was her husband, Michael - a man who loved her so much, he had just given her a kidney.
Suddenly, Michael's heart monitor started beeping.
"Something is happening to my husband! Please, save my husband!" ShellyAnn cried out.
Hospital workers rushed in, pulled the curtain between their beds and began pumping on his chest, urging, "Michael, open your eyes."
It was the last time ShellyAnn, 33, would see her 29-year-old spouse alive.
Now, after he made the ultimate sacrifice to save her life, she has learned that hospital insiders believe Michael's death was preventable - the result of serious errors in the surgery and the emergency response that night.
Michael is the first New York kidney donor to die from transplant surgery, and his death has prompted state and federal investigations.
The city medical examiner has ruled the cause was failure of a tiny polymer clip, called a Hem-o-lok, used to close an artery when Michael's kidney was cut out.
But in June 2006, the US Food and Drug Administration posted a manufacturer's "recall" of the Hem-o-lok clip for laparoscopic kidney-donor surgery - the kind Michael had - warning the device "may become dislodged" with "serious, even life-threatening consequences."
The laparoscopic method limits the surgeon's field of vision, making it harder to secure the clip.
The recall followed eight kidney-donor deaths, a medical journal reported.
The manufacturer, Teleflex, sent warning letters by registered mail to all its Hem-o-lok customers in August 2006.
A SUNY Downstate official claimed to have "hand delivered" the letter to the office of chief transplant surgeon Dr. Dale Distant, Michael's future surgeon, said a source close to the probe.
But Distant told The Post he never saw it - and continued to use the clip, which stayed on the market for other types of surgery, without a problem.
"Should I have been aware [of the warning]? Yes," he said. "Was I aware? I was not."
A disaster ensued. When Michael started bleeding internally at about 11 p.m. - some 12 hours after his surgery - panicked hospital staffers summoned Distant from his home in the Westchester town of Hartsdale, an hour's drive.
But any surgeon could have opened Michael, quickly stemmed the bleeding and saved his life, experts said. En route, Distant called a trauma doctor at next-door Kings County Hospital and asked her to check Michael.
But that doctor turned back without seeing Michael when she was beeped by her ER to treat a gunshot wound, an insider said.
A vascular surgeon at home closer to the hospital told probers he was "afraid to touch one of Dr. Distant's patients," the source said.
And two on-duty obstetricians, napping while waiting to perform C-sections, were not awakened to help.
When Distant arrived, King was in cardiac arrest and wheeled back into the operating room, which became awash in blood.
"We worked on him a long time," Distant said. King was declared dead at 2:30 a.m.
"It's inconceivable that on a weeknight in a major New York hospital, no surgeon was able to assist Mr. King," said Jeff Korek, a lawyer for the King family. "If you need immediate surgery, where better to be than in a hospital?"
Distant said, "When a disaster like this happens, it's not just one thing, but multiple things" that cause it.
State Health Department spokeswoman Claudia Hutton said officials are examining whether SUNY's "standard of care" fell short, and what changes could prevent a similar death.
SUNY Downstate has suspended its living-donor transplant program.
Hospital officials would not comment except to say SUNY is cooperating with the probes, and "we extend our deepest sympathies to the family and friends of the deceased."
Michael, a crew chief for a nonprofit that helps families make their homes energy-efficient, grew up in Guyana and moved to New York in 2000.
He and ShellyAnn, a day-care worker, married in 2002.
They moved to Flatbush, close to Michael's mom, Janis, and sister, Jinnill, who has three kids on whom Michael had doted.
The couple hoped to have a baby, but ShellyAnn got sick barely a year later. Michael finally offered his kidney to free her from grueling, thrice-a-week dialysis.
"Mom, I'm going to be OK," Michael promised.
As ShellyAnn heals - with a part of her husband inside her - she still can barely speak about her grief, Jinnill said.
"She believes in God. She prays. That helps her cope, day by day, with this tragedy."
Additional reporting by James Fanelli
susan.edelman@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/seven/12212008/news/regionalnews/brooklyn/kidney_op_gave_her_life__but_took_her_lo_145218.htm?page=0PHOTO: TRAGIC TRADE: ShellyAnn King with her husband Michael, who died in a bed next to hers at Brooklyn's SUNY Downstate Medical Center shortly after his kidney was transplanted to her.
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