Super Human: A 7-Year-Old Gets 5 Organ Transplant In One Operation

Little Jay Crouch is called “super-human” by his mum after having five organs transplanted in one operation. The seven-year-old is one of the youngest patients in the world to have the “incredibly rare” procedure.

He received two kidneys, a liver, a pancreas and a small intestine from an even younger donor child.

The five organs were removed in one “block” – meaning there were just six connections needed to attach them to Jay’s arteries in the ten-hour operation at Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

He is learning how to eat and swallow, starting with a slice of buttered toast.
Little jay, who is a Leicester City fan, had been in and out of hospital his entire life after his small intestine twisted and died when he was just six weeks old. His internal organs were so badly damaged he had to be fed through a tube in his stomach for years.

Jay’s mum, Katie Freestone, was told he would die without a transplant. The 28-year-old got a call in March to say a matching donor – a young child who had died – had been found.
Surgeons warned Katie, from Market Harborough, Leics, that Jay would face months of gruelling recovery. But he was discharged from hospital this week, just one month after the life-saving transplant took place.
She describes Jay as “my little super-human”.

Katie told the Mirror: “When I got the call, I cried, because I knew it was a smaller donor and that’s so sad. “You can’t express your gratitude enough towards them. There are not enough words. “Without the organs, Jay would not have survived. Saying thank you really doesn’t cover it. We don’t know much about the donor at all. All we know is it was a child smaller than Jay. “If the parents wanted to meet I would love to meet them. But right now I want to leave them to grieve because they have just lost a child.” She said.
Katie who is separated from Jay's dad said she suspected there was something badly wrong with baby Jay when he struggled to feed and go to the toilet days after being born. Her “world fell apart” when he fell seriously ill aged just six weeks – leaving doctors at Kettering General Hospital baffled at first. “He suddenly went floppy and lifeless and was vomiting bile,” said Katie

“We called the ambulance and got him to hospital. It was terrifying as he was such a tiny baby. “Jay at that time was dying. They did all the tests for meningitis , but didn’t check for a bowel problem. “After quite a few hours he ended up having a cardiac arrest and was fighting for his life. It took four hours for him to be stabilised enough to be transferred to the Leicester Royal Infirmary. “They still didn’t know what was wrong with him so they did some exploratory surgery and discovered the small intestine had died. “He was then placed on parenteral nutrition feeding into his veins, unable to eat or drink. As a complication, he got kidney failure, which has progressed.
“The PN feeding also destroyed the liver, so in the summer of 2016 they deemed him poorly enough to go on to the transplant list. We had a wait of 15 months before we got the call. “For the bowel, it needed to be a small donor, smaller than Jay, because you have to fit the whole small intestine inside. In the last few months his kidneys were really struggling, so if he didn’t have the transplant when he did we probably would have lost him.”
The way the operation was carried out means Jay now has four kidneys and two pancreases in his body.He will spend the next six months at home to minimise the risk of infection as his recovery continues. “We are in isolation to make sure he doesn’t pick up anything.” Katie said.

On how the transplant was carried out, the surgeon, Khalid Sharif said: The surgery is so rare that Birmingham Children’s Hospital say it is 20 years since they last carried out a transplant like Jay’s. His liver while the kidneys, pancreas, liver and intestine were being removed from the donor. The new set of organs were attached to Jay’s aorta in his stomach, giving him a blood supply from the heart. The blood went back to heart via the vein coming out of his liver. The small intestine was attached to his bowel and then surgeons had to wait. “There are two connections from the vessels’ points of view. One artery gives the blood to all five organs and one vein takes the blood out of it.

“There are two points to join the intestine and two to join the juice from the new kidneys to the bladder. “You need to see all the organs linking up together. If one is not doing it, that’s really heart breaking, because you do not know what is going on.”
Jay’s grand dad Tony Freestone, 58, is looking forward to introducing his grandson to the joys of food. He joked: “I’ve discussed going for a chicken vindaloo at some point, which he is not so keen on.”