Liver Health Liver Health Basics

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

MARK POCHAPIN: Welcome to our webcast. We're going to talk about a topic that is becoming more commonplace with increasing and improved surgical and medical techniques. That is transplantation. Organ transplantation we often think is something that really belongs in science fiction. With me today are two people who know quite a bit about transplantation. A friend and colleague, David Pearl, who works with me, is a liver transplant recipient. He is an ultrasound technologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Welcome, David.

David, let's focus on your story for a little bit. The reason I say "story" is because it really is quite a thing. We've discussed this in the past -- we've presented it to some of the medical students -- but I think it's important for people to understand what you went through. Currently you're an ultrasound specialist and you perform ultrasound on many people -- in fact liver ultrasounds, right? But that wasn't always the case before you were quite ill. I want to go back to the beginning of when you were diagnosed initially with not liver disease, but intestinal disease. Tell us a little about that.

DAVID PEARL: At the age of 18 I was diagnosed with colitis, which is basically an autoimmune disease where your body attacks your own intestines. Initially, it was just the colitis, but they realized that some of the inflammatory process had worked its way into the liver and was attacking my liver. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called sclerosing cholangitis.

MARK POCHAPIN: How old were you at that time?

DAVID PEARL: I was 18 years old.

MARK POCHAPIN: So you were 18 when you were diagnosed with the liver disease or with the colitis?

DAVID PEARL: With the colitis and the liver disease at the same time. Possibly the liver disease a few days later. They had done a liver biopsy and they diagnosed me with the liver disease.

MARK POCHAPIN: Now, the sclerosing cholangitis, as it's called, is a liver disorder. What did they tell you when you had the diagnosis of this?

DAVID PEARL: Actually, they really didn't handle it very well with an 18-year-old. They had told me that they were doing a lot of research and that they didn't know what would happen down the road but that they had hoped that transplant would evolve to give me my life back.

MARK POCHAPIN: So at this point, what year are we talking about, approximately?

DAVID PEARL: This was, I think, in '75, '76.

MARK POCHAPIN: So liver transplantation was really just something that people spoke about but wasn't, in fact, reality at that point.

DAVID PEARL: Right, because they hadn't come up with the magic drugs to ward off the rejection. They were just doing kidney transplants at the time.

MARK POCHAPIN: So what happened to you clinically? What type of symptoms did you develop?

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