DONOR | Jesse's Story

Jesse Sample

LIVING Liver DONOR NEEDED

Healthy livers can regrow and healthy people can donate portions of their liver to sick patients, like me, on the liver transplant waitlist!

Hello everyone, when it comes to talking about my health (especially on social media), I am very private. But I am in need of a liver transplant and that’s why I am writing this story. You see, what most of you probably don’t know about me is that I have liver failure due to cirrhosis.

Living with liver failure for the past 5 years has really taken a toll on my health. Although I didn’t know it when my liver starting failing, I felt unwell and my abdomen got very swollen. I can bruise really easily. I’ve had to be hospitalized several times from complications associated with my liver not working like it should. Once a month, I have to get drained of fluid… just yesterday they drained me of 9.5 liters—that’s almost five 2-liter bottles of Coke.

What you may not know is that healthy livers can regrow and healthy people can donate portions of their liver to sick patients, like me, on the liver transplant waitlist! Unfortunately, I have a low liver score, which puts me lower on the waitlist, but I am still in need of a transplant. My doctor told me that finding a living liver donor would be my best option. So please, if you can find it in your hearts to donate a portion of your liver to me or at least share this story to help me find a living donor, that would mean the world to me. My hope is to find a living donor so that I may receive a new liver and get back to living a normal life with my family and meeting my first grandson. Thank you for reading my story.

START YOUR JOURNEY

Become Jesse Sample's Donor

If you are considering being a living donor please use links below to contact Jesse Sample's Transplant Center. Begin by completing the donor questionnaire

Fill Out DONOR Questionnaire
(INQUIRES ARE 100% CONFIDENTIAL)

Becoming a Liver DONOR Find a Transplant Center near you

Johns Hopkins Hospital

1800 Orleans St, Baltimore, MD, 21287

(410) 614-2989 Email Transplant Center

Did you know?

Medical expenses for living organ donors are 100% covered, and inquires from potential donors are 100% confidential! Contact the Transplant Center to learn more about living donation.

More Donor FAQs

Share the Importance of Living Donation

Liver transplantation has been a successful treatment and standard of care for end-stage liver disease since the early 1980s.

Technical advancements in liver surgery, as well as the liver's tremendous ability to regenerate, have made living donor liver transplantation a life-saving reality.

There are currently 120,000 people waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant in the U.S. Of these, 15,000 await liver transplants.

Although more than 6,000 liver transplants were performed last year, over 1,700 patients died while waiting on the list.

Deceased donor livers are allocated to patients based on how sick they are, determined by their MELD score, where sicker patients receive priority.

Living donation offers patients the option of transplant before they get very sick--regardless of MELD score--significantly decreasing the time they wait for a liver.

Living donation not only saves the life of the recipient; it also frees up a liver for a patient on the waiting list who does not have that option.

The Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) and Pediatric End-Stage Liver Disease (PELD) are numerical, objective scales that allocate available livers to the sickest patients. Patients move up the list as their scores increase.

The first living donor liver transplant took place in 1988. Since then, living donors have continued giving the gift of life and making a difference.

When a recipient has a living donor, the wait time for transplant is shorter and the transplant can be scheduled in advanced when the recipient is in good health and when it is convenient for both the donor and the recipient.

Financial burdens shouldn’t prevent the gift of life. The National Living Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC) can offer financial support for living donor travel expenses.

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