Dear Friends,
I am writing you this evening from the Surgical Intensive Care Unit at Duke Medical Center in Durham. On Wednesday of this week around 11:40 am I received a call from Duke's on call transplant coordinator that they had a liver for me. You can imagine all that flooded my heart and mind as I heard those words, it's time to come to the hospital. I was just leaving Pizza Hut catching a bite to eat while at work. Earlier this week on Monday I got my labs back from Duke. My MELD had jumped from a 19 to a 33. It then put me at the top of the list at Duke. To make a long story short, I had had some pretty intense diarrhea for a few weeks. They told me that it could very well have driven my INR up artificially. Be that as it may it was to be at 33 for 7 days before they had to check it again.
Well we got to the hospital around 2:30 pm Wednesday. Surgery began around 10 pm and they finished up some 8 hours later. I now have a full size liver from a 22 year old man that had died earlier that evening in a motorcycle accident. Our hearts naturally went out to that family, but we are so grateful for their desire to provide this life saving gift. All I can do is to praise God for His boundless mercy upon my undeserving life. I am still trying to soak all this in as it happened so quickly. I will continue to support Ben's Friends and especially the PSC forums. Please keep me in your prayers as the road to recovery has began. I am attaching a few pictures. One is a picture of my diseased liver. Thanks again everyone.
Mark Wilson
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