Girl Who Got New Liver Loses Spleen

Seven-year-old Jamie Fiske, who as an infant received a liver transplant after her father’s impassioned appeal for a donor, underwent surgery Monday to remove her spleen.

“She’s in the recovery room now doing very well,” Dr. John Najarian said after the three-hour operation at University of Minnesota Hospital. The girl was listed in critical but stable condition.

Najarian said the spleen was seven or eight times normal size for a child Jamie’s age. He also said her liver “is perfectly normal.”

It was the first surgery for Jamie since her 1982 liver transplant, said Jamie’s father, Charles Fiske of Bridgewater, Mass. At the time, she was one of the youngest liver transplant recipients.

Jamie was born with biliary atresia, a condition in which the liver’s bile ducts are blocked.