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 described how she suffered a blood clot in one of the vessels that carries blood from the small intestine, which caused her to vomit blood and sent her to the emergency room as her symptoms progressed. were intensifying.
“They just saw that everything was completely black, necrotic, dead,” Perea told the station. “They (told my boyfriend), ‘There’s no way she’s going to survive this, you need 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 intravenous nutrition before receiving a successful transplant.
“They just said, ‘You need to go to the clinic immediately.’ That was not an option,” Perea recalls, recounting how, in June 2020, she got the call she had been waiting for.
The operation that followed 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 a little more than 200 days after tying the knot with 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 he probably has 24 hours to live,” she recalled.
Doctors would then transfer her to a hospice, waiting for the days to pass until her seemingly inevitable death.
But there, she exceeded doctors’ expectations, maintaining “strong vital signs” for more than a week.
At this point, she, Luis and her mother searched for some sort of savior and found one in the Cleveland Clinic’s intestinal transplant program.
Program leader Dr. Kareem Abu-Elmagd then agreed to take on Perea’s small intestine replacement, paving the way for the next step in the then-graduate student’s grueling road to recovery: l waiting for a suitable partner.
At that point, she was transferred to the Ohio hospital, with the 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 forced her to undergo another surgery – this time to repair damage to her trachea from 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 considered a match in April 2020, she said.
Two months later, she received a call informing her that another organ was available, after which she underwent a 10-hour operation.
Although these transplants are notoriously difficult and rare, the operation was a success, she told CBS – before revealing that she was then still confined to a hospital room on and off for several months, after have suffered from frequent fevers.
Then, in January 2021, she underwent another procedure, this one to repair her abdominal wall and reverse an incision made during the operation.
She was subsequently given a full health check, before living her life with her beloved for the next four years.
In November of last year, they were married in Perea’s hometown of Lafayette.
During this time, she was also able to complete her education 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 control her condition.
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 has been “super normal” so far and she looks forward to a long and healthy life.
“I have no restrictions. My incisions have healed well,” Perea said, referring to her November wedding. “We bought a house,” she added. “Everything is fine.”
As for parting words from Cleveland Clinic doctors, she said, “They say, ‘Just keep living your life.’ Nothing’s stopping you.”
They were responsible for 18 of the 95 intestinal transplants performed in the United States last year, with the operation having a low success rate due to it being a “difficult” organ to monitor, and having the highest rejection rate of all types of organ transplantation.
Pera, however, overcame the obstacles, offering hope to anyone facing a similar undertaking.