The city of Athens, Ala., is saluting one of Athens, Greece’s favorite sons for bringing renewed hope to a local family.

Mayor Dan Williams said Friday he is writing a proclamation and sending off a key to the city to Dr. Andreas Tzakis, director of the University of Miami’s gastrointestinal transplant center.

Tzakis, a native of Athens, Greece, performed a 13-hour, six-organ transplant on Sara Ultz, 28, of Athens two weeks ago.

Sara is recuperating at the University’s Jackson Memorial Hospital and will probably remain there at least until Christmas, according to her father, Athens Code Enforcement Officer Ron Ultz.

Both of Sara’s parents work for the city of Athens. Her mother, Gail Ultz, is employed in the Public Works Department.

Word from the hospital Friday was that Sara was sitting up and enjoying her first meal since getting a stomach, pancreas, spleen, liver, and small and large intestines on Oct. 18. The University of Alabama at Birmingham graduate student in business has been fed intravenously since an obstruction caused a portion of her small intestine to die in August 2005. Three surgeries on three-consecutive days left her with just 18 inches of small intestine. She subsequently had to be fed intravenously. According to her father, when doctors went to reconnect the remaining small intestine to the rest of her digestive tract in March, they found the intestine had “dissolved” and had to be removed.

“The doctors came out and said the surgery went wonderfully, only (they said) Sara would be on an ostomy bag for the rest of her life,” said Ultz.

Ultz came home from the hospital depressed about his daughter. Unable to sleep and unable to accept his daughter’s prognosis, Ultz said he sat down at his computer, dialed up the Internet and typed in “small bowel transplant.” Tzakis’ name popped up second on the list.

“I e-mailed him at 5 o’clock in the morning and just one hour later I got a personal response back from him, and two hours later I got a message from his assistant saying they wanted Sara to come into their clinic for an evaluation,” said Ultz. “She and I got on a plane in July and flew down there. They said Sara’s health was good, considering everything she had been through.

“He said, ‘I can help you.’ Talk about bringing tears to your eyes,” said Ultz.

The hospital helped them get approval for transplant surgery from Sara’s insurance carrier and her name went on a transplant list. Sara’s surgeries up to that point had cost more than $1 million.

He said Sara became increasingly depressed. “The following Saturday I talked her into going with me to a Fraternal Order of Police state function in Montgomery,” said Ultz. “Her mother called at 2:30 in the morning and said we had to get to Miami immediately because organs had become available.”

Ultz knew a commercial flight would take too long, so he contacted UAB and got a flight on the hospital’s Lear air ambulance at a cost of $14,000 for the 1-hour, 45-minute flight to Miami.

“Gail came down on a commercial flight, but when we got down there we found out the organs were not good. We flew back, getting home at 5 a.m. Monday,” said Ultz. “The next morning at 5:30 we got a call that there was another donor and took a commercial flight down. The next morning, on the 18th, she had the transplants.”

Gail Ultz, who is waging her own battle with kidney failure and might face a transplant, said they were not told much about the organ donor, only that it was a “large child.”

“She was upset when she found out the organs were coming from a child, but they had to have a donor that was near her size because she had lost down to 122 pounds,” said Gail.

About 300 of these multivisceral transplants have been done worldwide, with about half of them done at the Miami hospital, according to the Associated Press, who quoted Tzakis. In 2005, the hospital performed 18 transplants. So far this year, the hospital has performed 28.

Educated in Greece and the United States, Tzakis is the author or co-author of more than 300 papers. In addition to being an accomplished liver transplant surgeon, Tzakis has been a principal contributor to the development of small bowel and multiple-organ transplantation. He performed history-making baboon-to-human liver transplants at the Pittsburgh Medical Center. He joined the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1994.

To learn more about becoming an organ donor visit: www.transplantfoundation.org