‘Bloodless’ Transplant Saves Life

In the end, the religious faith that could have killed William Jennings saved his life.

The 44-year-old computer programmer was suffering from liver failure when doctors told him his only hope of living longer than six months was a transplant.

Such operations are notoriously difficult and messy, however--sometimes requiring up to 80 pints of donated blood.

And Jennings is a devout Jehovah’s Witness whose beliefs prohibit a single drop of another person’s blood from entering his body.

But when Jennings told nervous surgeons at USC-University Hospital that he didn’t fear dying on the operating table because he was convinced he would “wake up in paradise,” they agreed to try to transplant half his brother’s liver into him.

The surgery was a success, officials said Monday as a beaming Jennings walked from the Los Angeles hospital after having 56 staples removed from his abdomen. It is the world’s first “bloodless” transplant operation of its type.

Doctors said lessons learned from the 15-hour procedure may help growing numbers of others who prefer surgery with as few transfusions as possible because of fears of blood-transmitted diseases.

Jennings lives with his wife and two children in Big River, Calif., a Colorado River community that is a four-hour drive east of Los Angeles.

For years he had increasingly suffered from primary sclerosing cholangitis, a liver disease that causes a narrowing and inflammation of the body’s bile ducts.

When he grew too weak to work, his doctors told him his only hope was a transplant operation. Oh, oh, replied Jennings.

The 1 million or so Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States refuse transfusions, tracing their prohibition against the “consumption” of blood to the biblical time of Noah.

“We’re commanded to abstain from blood. We take it quite literally,” Jennings said Monday.

“I understand getting blood is routine for a lot of operations and it makes a doctor’s job a lot easier. But blood is sacred to me and my God, Jehovah. I simply can’t take a blood transfusion.”

Doctors decided to attempt the so-called bloodless surgery after Jennings persuaded them he was not afraid of dying--a real possibility if anything went wrong.

“I view death differently than a lot of people,” Jennings said. “According to the Bible, there will be a resurrection of the righteous. . . . If I were to die on the operating table I have strong faith I would be resurrected into a paradise.”

Surgeons at USC-University Hospital have performed transfusion-free operations on heart and kidney patients before. But they say they thought long and hard about Jennings’ surgery after identifying his brother, Scott Jennings, 40, of Grass Valley, Calif. as a suitable donor.

“We strategized for a long time,” said Dr. Rick Selby. “It’s an assault felony if you use blood products on people who decline them.”

Although so-called living transplants usually involve simultaneous operations on recipients and donors, Selby and Drs. Nicolas Jabbour and Yuri Genyk decided to operate on William Jennings first--attempting to clamp off blood vessels and reclaim any spilled blood before removing the right half of Scott Jennings’ liver. Because of that, the procedure took twice as long as the 6 1/2 hours that normal transplants take.

If Jennings had started to bleed to death, “we’d have allowed him to expire,” Selby said. “Hopefully the donor would not have given his half liver at that point.”

Selby said that as liver transplants become common, “the challenge now is to offer it to a population that has restrictions concerning blood loss.”

Randy Henderson, who coordinates the hospital’s transfusion-free medicine program, said the June 15 operation was the first of its kind anywhere.

Although Jehovah’s Witnesses have been primary subjects of such surgeries in the past, a growing number of people request them because of anemia problems or because of concern over HIV and hepatitis blood contamination, Henderson said.

Jennings said his strength is returning as he recuperates at his sister’s home in Granada Hills. Doctors anticipate the liver will grow to a normal size in a few more weeks.

“Dr. Selby said I’ll feel like I’m 30 again,” he said. “I said that’s great. Because I didn’t feel 30 when I was 30.”