Jennifer Stasieluk was devastated as she watched Covid-19 end lives. For nearly two years, she worked 12-hour overnight shifts at a hospital in New Lenox, Illinois, about 40 miles Southwest of Chicago in the Covid unit, she says.
The 29-year-old also spent time working with cancer patients in the oncology wing. The nurse said she found herself delivering tough news, telling families of patients in her care, “there’s nothing more we can do.”
“I felt so helpless. No one knew the correct way to treat [Covid]. We became very close with our patients and their families since they did not have anyone at their bedside. There was a no visitor policy,” Jennifer Stasieluk said. “We had iPads or even sometimes our personal phones so their families could see them and offer a tiny bit of comfort.”
And Jennifer Stasieluk knows what it’s like to have the roles reversed.
During the pandemic, her mother’s 19-year battle with a liver disease she had managed to control worsened. Plus, her mother, Marzena Stasieluk, had been diagnosed with kidney failure in 2015 and was on dialysis.
But Marzena Stasieluk’s liver scores didn’t meet the requirements to be placed on the waiting list for a deceased liver donor, according to Jennifer. When people go on a list waiting for a liver, they have a priority score. That priority score determines when they can get a liver. The higher the priority score, the shorter the potential waiting time.
“There was a time we didn’t know if we would have my mom around for Christmas. It was a very complicated situation where she needed a new liver to do a kidney transplant. However, her liver by itself wasn’t sick enough,” Jennifer said. “We went to two different hospitals. I also wasn’t a direct kidney match. So, they kind of, like, threw their hands up and we’re just, kind of, like, ‘sorry.'”
But then, a call from the Mayo Clinic in January 2020 changed their lives. Doctors suggested Marzena, now 57, get a portion of a liver from a living donor. Her daughter volunteered to get tested and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Dr. Timucin Taner is Division Chair of Transplant surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and also performed the nearly five hour living liver transplant surgery for the Stasieluks. Taner said before the liver transplant, Marzena’s body would’ve rejected Jennifer’s kidney. Taner said the new liver changed Marzena’s immune activity.
“To our knowledge, this is the first case that we have shown this in humans, that the same donor through the liver’s amazing capacity to change the immune response allowed for a kidney transplant to happen as well,” Taner said.
“The liver transplant itself modulates the immune responses against itself. So initially, Jennifer’s mom had a lot of antibodies towards Jennifer’s tissue. So, when that happens and if you were to do a kidney transplant in that setting, the kidney will be rejected, and you would have kidney injury and that the kidney may not last as long. So what’s amazing about Jennifer is what she did not only once, but twice. She saved her mom’s life twice.
