A Louisiana woman has explained how doctors told her she had less than a day to live after suffering from stomach pain.
Danielle Perea, 24, received that prognosis more than five years ago and this week described how she is still alive in an interview with CBS News.
She recalled how she suffered a blood clot in one of the vessels that carry blood from the small intestine, leaving her vomiting blood and ending up in the emergency room as her symptoms intensified.
“They saw that everything was completely black, necrotic, dead,” Perea told the station. “They (told my boyfriend), ‘She has no chance of surviving this, you have to call her parents.’”
Recalling how they were both told she ‘probably had 24 hours to live’, she then revealed how she defied the odds – spending a year and a half living on nutrition administered intravenously before receiving a successful transplant.
“They just told me, ‘You need to go to the clinic immediately.’ It wasn’t an option,” Perea recalls recalling how, in June 2020, she received the call she was waiting for.
The ensuing operation lasted 10 hours, during which doctors worked tirelessly to treat his mesenteric ischemia.
Years earlier, surgeons had tried unsuccessfully to save his small intestine, but there were too many dead cells – also called necrotic tissue – in other words,
“They just saw that everything was completely black, necrotic, dead,” Perea told the publication just over 200 days after marrying her husband, Luis.
“They (told Luis), ‘She’s not going to survive this, you need to call her parents. Get everyone who needs to be here because she probably has 24 hours to live,'” she recalled.
Doctors then transferred her to a hospice facility, the days passing until her seemingly inevitable demise.
But there she exceeded doctors’ expectations, maintaining “strong vital functions” for more than a week.
At this point, she, Luis and her mother looked for some kind of savior and found one in the Cleveland Clinic’s intestinal transplant program.
The program’s director, Dr. Kareem Abu-Elmagd, then agreed to take on the task of replacing Perea’s small intestine, making way for the next step in the then-graduate student’s grueling journey to recovery: the waiting for a suitable match.
At that point, she was transferred to the Ohio hospital, with her small intestine almost completely resected.
Her condition quickly stabilized, however, and after several subsequent surgeries, she was ready to be added to the program’s transplant list in spring 2019.
She spent the next year living on nutrients injected intravenously, because without a intestine she couldn’t eat normally.
The length of this stage required her to undergo further surgery, this one repairing the damage caused to her windpipe by a breathing tube before she could receive the transplant.
That would add to the time she had to wait, with the pandemic further complicating the process by forcing her to pass on an organ that would have been deemed a match in April 2020, she said.
Two months later, she received a call that another organ had become available, after which she underwent a 10-hour surgery.
Although such transplants are notoriously difficult and rare, the operation was a success, she told CBS – before revealing that she was still confined to a hospital room on and off for several months after suffering from frequent fevers.
Then, in January 2021, she underwent another procedure — this time to repair the wall of her abdomen and reverse an incision made during the operation.
She was subsequently given a full clean bill of health, before living out her life with her beloved for the next four years.
In November of last year, they would marry in Lafayette, Perea’s hometown.
During this time, she was also able to complete her degree as a clinical laboratory science student at the University of West Florida, before accepting a job as a medical technologist at Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola.
She added to CBS that although she now lives relatively normally, she has to take “about 40 pills a day” to keep her condition under control.
She also discussed the possibility that she might still need a kidney transplant in the future, due to the amount of anti-rejection medications she was forced to take that inherently damage the organ.
Still, she said everything is “super normal” so far and she hopes to live a long and healthy life.
“I have no restrictions. My incisions have healed well,” Perea said, reflecting on her wedding in November. “We bought a house,” she added. ” Everything is going well. »
As for the Cleveland Clinic doctors’ parting words, she said: “They say, ‘Just keep living your life. There’s nothing stopping you.'”
They were responsible for 18 of the 95 intestinal transplants performed in the United States last year, the operation having a low success rate due to it being a “difficult” organ to monitor, and having the highest rejection rate of any type of organ transplant.
Pera, however, defied all odds, offering hope to all those facing a similar undertaking.