A Louisiana woman recounted the time she suffered abdominal pain and was told by doctors she had less than a day to live.
Daniel Perea, 24, was diagnosed more than five years ago and said in an interview this week that he’s still alive. CBS News.
She recalled a blood clot in one of the blood vessels that carries blood from her small intestine that caused her to cough up blood and her condition worsened, landing her in the emergency room.
“They saw everything was black, necrotic, dead,” Perea told the station. “They told (my boyfriend), ‘There’s no chance she’s going to survive. We have to call her parents.'”
She recalled her parents telling her she probably only had 24 hours to live, and shared how she overcame adversity by being fed intravenously for a year and a half before undergoing transplant surgery.
“They just said, ‘Come to the clinic right away.’ It wasn’t an option,” Perea recalled of getting the long-awaited call in June 2020.
The subsequent surgery took 10 hours, during which doctors worked tirelessly to treat her mesenteric ischemia.
Several years ago, surgeons tried unsuccessfully to save her small intestine, but there was too much dead tissue, also known as necrotic tissue.
“They saw everything was black, necrotic, dead,” Perea told the magazine, just over 200 days after marrying her husband, Luis.
“They told (Lewis), ‘She’s not expected to survive. I want you to call her parents. I want you to bring anyone who needs to come here because she probably only has 24 hours left to live,'” she recalled.
Doctors then moved her into hospice care, and the days ticked away until her death seemed inevitable.
But she exceeded doctors’ expectations, maintaining “strong vital signs” for more than a week.
At this point, she, Lewis and her mother searched for some kind of savior, and they found it in the Cleveland Clinic’s intestinal transplant program.
The program’s director, Dr. Kareem Abu Elmagd, then agreed to take on the task of replacing Perea’s small intestine, allowing the then-graduate student to begin the next stage of his grueling recovery: waiting for a matching graft.
At that point, she had almost her entire small intestine removed and was transferred to a hospital in Ohio.
But her condition quickly stabilized, and after several surgeries, she was ready to be added to the program’s transplant list in the spring of 2019.
Without an intestine, she was unable to eat normally and so survived for the next year on intravenous nutrition alone.
During this phase, she was forced to undergo yet another operation to repair damage caused to her trachea by the breathing tube before undergoing the transplant.
This means she has to wait even longer, and the pandemic has forced her to give up an organ that would have been deemed a match in April 2020, further complicating the process, she said.
Two months later, she received a call that another organ was available and subsequently underwent a 10-hour operation.
While these transplants are notoriously difficult and rare, she told CBS the procedure was successful, and revealed that she suffered frequent fevers afterwards that kept her confined to her hospital room on and off for several months.
Then in January 2021, she underwent yet another surgery, this time to repair her abdominal wall and close the incisions made during surgery.
She was subsequently given a medical check-up and spent the next four years enjoying the rest of her life with her loved ones.
The couple were scheduled to marry last November in Perea’s hometown of Lafayette.
During that time, she earned a degree in clinical laboratory science from the University of West Florida and then went to work as a medical technologist at Ascension Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola.
She told CBS that while she is now living a relatively normal life, she added that she still has to take “about 40 pills a day” to keep her condition under control.
She also revealed that she may need a kidney transplant in the future as she is forced to take anti-rejection drugs, which are essentially damaging her organs.
Still, she said everything has been “quite normal” so far and she looks forward to living a long and healthy life.
“I have no restrictions, my incisions are healing well,” Perea said, noting that she got married in November. “I bought a house,” she added. “Everything is going well.”
Describing the parting words given to her by doctors at the Cleveland Clinic, she said: “They said, ‘Just keep living your life. Nothing is going to stop you.'”
The center performed 18 of the 95 intestinal transplants performed in the United States last year, but intestinal transplants have a low success rate because the organ is “difficult to monitor” and has the highest rejection rate of any organ transplant.
But Pera overcame the odds and is offering hope to others facing similar challenges.