Maliyah's kidney functioning well

A day after receiving a kidney from her mother, Maliyah Herrin is breathing on her own and has been upgraded from critical to serious condition.

As for her mom, Erin Herrin, 26, "She's not feeling well, but she's doing well," said Primary Children's Medical Center spokeswoman Bonnie Midget.

Maliyah's new kidney is also functioning well, "producing tons of urine," as dad Jake Herrin described it on the family's Web page, Herrintwins.com.

Maliyah was born joined to twin sister Kendra at the abdomen and shared several organs. They had a single kidney, which testing showed actually belonged to Kendra, although Maliyah was able to access it through the liver to which both supplied blood.

In August, two large teams of surgeons separated the girls in a 26-hour surgery and the busy, active preschoolers have been progressing very well. But Maliyah has needed dialysis three times a week since.

That ended Tuesday with the implantation of Erin's right kidney into her daughter's abdomen, a surgery that took about seven hours and went perfectly, according to two surgeons on the transplant team, Dr. John Sorensen and Dr. Rebecka Meyers.

Less than a day after surgery, doctors removed the tube that had been helping Maliyah breathe and upgraded her condition.

As for Erin Herrin's pain, it's about what you'd expect the first day after a big surgery, Midget said.

Prior to the transplant, the surgeons told reporters that the period immediately after a kidney transplant is usually hard on the donor, who goes into the hospital feeling normal and wakes up with an incision and the pain associated with it. The recipient, on the other hand, in some ways feels better simply because a kidney is functioning properly.

It's expected that Erin Herrin will heal quite quickly and will likely be hospitalized a week or less, said Dr. Patrick Cartwright, pediatric urologist and part of the transplant team.

Maliyah is likely to be in the hospital a couple of weeks and perhaps longer. They have to make sure the kidney's working well and continues to do so and that she doesn't develop an infection. And they'll also have to fine tune her immuno-suppressant medications so that she doesn't run the risk of a severe organ rejection, where her own body turns against the new kidney because it's got unfamiliar tissue. Those same issues need to be addressed with any kidney transplant.

The surgery itself went very well, Meyers said afterward. The surgeons found less severe scarring than they feared from the separation surgery. And the kidney, while a snug fit, could be placed in Maliyah's small abdomen without creating too much pressure on it or on other organs.

Jake Herrin told reporters the whole family's been looking forward to having the kidney transplant behind them so they can enjoy the summer, including activities like swimming that Maliyah could not do while on dialysis.

The Herrins, who live in North Salt Lake, are also parents of Courtney, 7, and twins Austin and Justin, 22 months.

---

E-mail: lois@desnews.com