Infant gets 4-organ transplant

INDIANAPOLIS -- A 14-month-old girl who was born without the ability to digest food was recovering Wednesday after undergoing surgery to replace her intestines, liver, pancreas and stomach.\nDoctors said Stormy Bryant was healing from the surgery, known as a multivisceral transplant. Only 29 such procedures were performed last year in the United States, doctors said. Stormy was the first transplant patient in Indiana.\nStormy was at Riley Hospital for Children seeking treatment for an infection Saturday when news came that a donor had been found. She has been sedated and on a ventilator since the surgery last weekend.\n"It's hard to see her attached to everything," said her mother, Tavi Bryant of Clayton, about 20 miles west of Indianapolis. "It's like you just want to pick her up, but you know you can't."\nStormy was born with only 20 centimeters of lower intestine. Most newborn babies have between 200 and 300 centimeters. She has been fed intravenously since birth. The medical regimen necessary to keep her alive has kept her from learning to crawl or walk.\nShe was put on the transplant list in July after her liver began to fail.\n"It's not really well-charted territory," surgeon Joseph Tector said. "It's a very, very big operation, and the people who need it are usually very sick."\nStormy will have to be on anti-rejection medication for the rest of her life and likely will be recovering at Riley for about three months.\n"She probably wants to wake up and play and get back to being herself," said her father, Joseph Bryant, 24, a criminal justice student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.\nThe transplant is the second involving an intestine at Clarian Hospitals, which includes Riley.\nThe hospital needs to demonstrate a 65 percent survival rate with 10 to 12 transplants in the next year to continue performing the operation.