Mistake Learned at End of Surgery : Patient Gets Heart, but the Wrong One

Surgeons at Barnes Hospital had reached the point of stitching up the chest of their 47-year-old transplant patient when they learned they had just given him a heart from an incompatible donor.

Now the man suffers from cardiomyopathy, an irreversible deterioration of heart tissue, and needs a second transplant to survive. He was in serious but stable condition today, the hospital said.

During the transplant March 21, doctors were “at the point of closing him up when they received a call that they’d mistakenly been given the heart from a donor of the wrong blood type,” said hospital spokesman John Miller.

The patient, who has not been publicly identified, has type A blood and the donor had type B, Miller said.

Hospital officials said the error in typing the blood was made in Texas, but refused to identify the agency that sent the heart to St. Louis.

In Dallas, the Southwest Organ Bank confirmed it had obtained the heart, but said the blood-typing was performed elsewhere.

Doctors gave the patient higher than usual doses of an immune-suppressant drug called cyclosporine, and the drug has slowed rejection, Miller said.

Signs of rejection of the donated heart did not appear until a week after the surgery, when the patient was immediately placed on the waiting list for a second transplant operation.

Doctors did not know how long it would be before the patient would reject the heart completely.