THE Miracle Kid : Medicine: Young stabbing victim had been unable to take food by mouth for two years. After numerous surgeries, including a rare transplant, he is looking forward to a normal life.

Guillermo (T.J.) Martinez’s hunger for life has little to do with the fact that he has not had a meal in more than two years.

The 20-year-old from New Jersey, a patient at UCLA Medical Center, has been unable to take food by mouth since a massive infection forced doctors to remove his small intestines. He has undergone numerous surgeries costing a total of $2 million, including a a rare small-intestine-liver transplant. In November, he became the 15th person worldwide to undergo such a transplant. UCLA is only the second medical center in the nation to successfully perform the operation.

Despite countless weeks in the hospital and away from family and friends, Martinez has remained upbeat through it all and is eager to resume a normal life.

Since his arrival at the hospital in September, Martinez has won the hearts of dozens of people on the staff, who have tried to provide him with a taste of life in Los Angeles. They have taken him to see the sights, from Venice to Beverly Hills, provided him with tickets to see the Lakers and the Kings, and given him autographs from Sylvester Stallone and Wayne Gretzky.

“He is a miracle kid,” said Joan Ullrich, a nutritionist. “When he came here, he was living day-to-day. They used to call him the green patient because he was in horrible liver failure. But there is something special about this kid. He’s not a quitter, and he is going to make something out of his life.”

Martinez’s medical ordeal began in June, 1989, in his hometown of Vineland, N.J., two weeks before he was to graduate from high school. He had been living with his sister. His mother had died a few months earlier, and his father was confined to a nursing home. Martinez arrived home from working the late shift at a takeout restaurant to find a man harassing his family, asking about Martinez’s older brother who had been involved with drugs. Martinez called the police and remained on the street to keep a lookout. He said he didn’t realize that he was in danger until he felt the piercing blow of a knife as it penetrated his left side.

“I never saw his face,” he said. “There wasn’t much pain at first, and I began chasing him down the street. Then I started to get this warm feeling, and I looked down and saw all the blood on my T-shirt. I got dizzy and fell to the sidewalk.” Martinez said he thinks the man mistook him for his brother.

He was released from the hospital in time to attend his graduation but he soon developed an infection that put him back in the hospital. When surgery failed to restore the blood supply to his small intestine, doctors were forced to remove the organ.

During this time, Martinez had moved into the house of Al Constantino, a former employer. Constantino and his wife, Jane, treated Martinez like a son, taking him to medical specialists in nearby Philadelphia where he underwent additional surgeries, all the while getting his nourishment from intravenous feedings.

Martinez said one of the most difficult things to deal with was his natural desire to take food by mouth.

“At first it was even hard to watch television commercials on food, but soon I got used to it,” he said. “Al would make me sit at the table with the family during mealtime, during Thanksgiving dinner, until I became used to watching them eat. I would sip on some water or something.”

And then the news got worse. Doctors discovered that the intravenous feeding and the antibiotics were damaging Martinez’s liver.

Dr. Rolando Rolandelli, assistant professor of surgery at UCLA, had treated Martinez at the University of Pennsylvania and kept in touch with the youth.

“He is a wonderful kid and we sort of clicked,” said Rolandelli, a native of Argentina. “He is very mature for his age. He was graduating from high school, managing a store and taking care of his family.”

So when he heard about Martinez’s worsening condition, Rolandelli encouraged UCLA Medical Center to consider Martinez as a candidate for a small bowel-liver transplant.

The procedure had been successful in animals but was not yet routine in humans. The first successful procedure was done in 1987 at the University of London in Ontario, Canada. The University of Pittsburgh repeated the operation two years later. But Rolandelli said it was Martinez’s only hope.

Last September, he was brought to UCLA Medical Center, where doctors had concluded that Rolandelli was right. All they had to do was wait for a donor. The break came in November when doctors were able to obtain the organs from a Southern California man who had died from a brain hemorrhage.

A team of UCLA surgeons and transplant specialists performed the highly complex, 11-hour procedure Nov. 12.

“This was an emergency operation,” said Dr. Ronald W. Busuttil, who headed the transplant team. “If we had not found a donor with the same blood type and body fit within the right window of time, he would not be here today.”

It was Martinez’s eighth surgery in two years.

“This procedure is definitely on the frontiers of medical knowledge and accomplishment,” Busuttil said. “A great deal of research has gone into this program, and there is still much we don’t know.”

But new medications have reduced the risk of infection and the tendency of the body to reject the transplanted organs, he said.

Busuttil said it was difficult at this point to gauge the success of the operation because so few procedures have been performed. Martinez, he said, experienced one minor bout with rejection after surgery but “has had a nice recovery and we expect him to resume a normal lifestyle.”

After the surgery, Martinez began receiving nutrients by tube directly into his newly functioning intestine. On Tuesday, he had improved so much that he was able to nibble on some salmon and even had a bite of a chocolate-covered banana.

Since his stabbing in 1989, Martinez’s medical bills have totaled nearly $2 million, which is being paid by Medicaid in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Constantinos paid his costs to get to UCLA.

Despite all he’s been through, Martinez still feels lucky. “I have a lot to be thankful for,” he said in an interview.

Martinez said that someday he would like to visit family members in Puerto Rico and go to college to study computer science.

But, for now, he’ll settle for that first complete meal.

“I would like to have a nice T-bone steak, mashed potatoes and some vegetables,” he said. “Yes, that will do for starters.”