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A Liver.. and a Life: A Transplant Recipient's Story

Summary & Participants

After years of suffering from a progressive gastrointestinal disease, David Pearl reached a point where his life depended on a liver transplant. He waited and waited... and finally the call came. Join us as he shares his remarkable story of survival and renewal, and discusses the emotional challenge of receiving the gift of life from another person's tragedy.

Medically Reviewed On: July 16, 2008

Webcast Transcript

DAVID PEARL: With the combination of the colitis and the liver disease -- sclerosing cholangitis is a very slow-moving disease. It's something that doesn't sneak up on you quickly. It works very slowly. So that wasn't so much of an issue. Occasionally I would have bouts of jaundice, some fatigue and stuff like that. But the colitis at that point, until they got that under control, was more of a difficulty -- frequent bowel movements, weight loss, trouble eating -- that was the issue at that point.

MARK POCHAPIN: When did the liver issue become more of a problem, something that was not easily handled?

DAVID PEARL: Actually, they were watching my enzymes as I saw a gastroenterologist through the years, and my liver enzymes were starting to bump up and get elevated. I'd actually gone out to Minnesota, to the Mayo Clinic, to look at the transplant team out there. I guess I was an educated consumer, but I was a little leery about being transplanted in New York. Being a native New Yorker, maybe I thought if they couldn't fill the cracks in a street how could they give me a new liver? So after I came back from Minnesota a few months later, I had gone up to Mount Sinai and I met the transplant team up there and I was very impressed with how well they had handled everything and spoken to me, and I was pretty comfortable with them. Actually, the day after I saw the transplant team I had a bleed, an esophageal bleed.

MARK POCHAPIN: What does that mean? It means you were vomiting blood?

DAVID PEARL: I was throwing up blood, projectile blood, which is very dangerous. It's very easy for you to bleed to death at that point with a bad liver.

MARK POCHAPIN: The medical term is called a variceal bleed, and the varices are due to the increased pressure in the liver trying to get the blood away from the liver, and the way we're wired up, it forms around the esophagus. So you had a major life-threatening bleed the day after, in fact, you had seen this transplant service in New York. Now, what year are we talking about?

DAVID PEARL: This was December of '91. It was the day after Christmas, December 26. My wife was out -- she's a nurse -- she was out with a friend who is a doctor, actually -- and I just started throwing up blood and I had seen the transplant team the day before. I called them up and they told me, "Get into the city right now." Some of my friends drove me into Manhattan. It was a gastroenterologist was trying to stabilize me at that point. They were trying to tie off the varices in my throat and get me stabilized and assess the situation at that point.

MARK POCHAPIN: Now, how long did you stay sick to the point where you finally did get a liver transplant?

DAVID PEARL: I was badly sick from that day of the bleed until the transplant.

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