Karen Hoyt is a blogger who has a story about hepatitis C, cirrhosis, end-stage liver disease, liver cancer, and liver transplantation. This excerpt first appeared on Karen’s I Help C blog.

Denied for Transplant List. Most of us don’t know how the whole transplant system works. It’s stays out there in a vague corner of our mind. It’s a place that we don’t want to think about. Ever. Then something happens, like liver failure or cancer and suddenly we need to know. We venture into the process with our medical team. For some, one test leads to another until we are listed. You can read more about that here. But what happens when you are denied for transplant list for whatever reason? Just so you know, I’m posting this quickly and “as is” for a certain best friend who was just denied. It’s messy and was typed late last night as a way to try and understand what he is going through. Argh. Cry I put hyperlinks throughout to more info about listing.

The Transplant Tests


Physical

MRI – A magnetic resonance imaging machine takes slices of pictures of your body. It is used to locate the size and location of tumors if you have liver cancer. It can also be used to rule out the presence of any other tumors in your body.

Blood Labs – I can’t name every single test that’s done. Each doctor, hospital, and medical condition is different. I know they check cancer, or tumor markers, blood gasses, and more.

Pulmonary – The lung test is done by doing various breathing exercises where the strength of your ability to inhale and exhale is measured. They test your oxygen uptake to see how well your lungs can handle stress.

Cardiology – In order to see if your heart is strong enough to make it through a several hour surgery, they test your heart. A stress test can be performed on a treadmill while you are hooked up to heart monitors. If you are too weak, they also perform it using blood tests.

Bone scan – This is one of the last tests they performed on me. It takes a long time and looks to see if there are any signs that disease or cancer has spread.

The Transplant team also looks at your psychological health, habits, and ability to pay for immune suppressant medication for life. It was a TOUGH 4 days and I talk about it cheerfully if you click this link, but it was TOUGH.

The Hard Part...click here to read the rest of Karen’s blog, and find out about the hard part ot being denied a place on the transplant list.