Sara Ultz, 28, continues to recover from an October 2006 six-organ transplant. She is convalescing at the Newby Road home of her father, Ron Ultz, code enforcement officer for the city of Athens.

“This Saturday, it will be a month that I’ve been home. Who would have thought it?”

Who indeed would have thought that 28-year-old Sara Ultz would survive an October 2006 six-organ transplant only to face more transplants this spring when the new organs malfunctioned?

However, a new medicine proved to be a wonder drug for Sara and she was released from Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital to the care of her parents in Athens last month without having to have the dangerous procedure repeated.

Sara, daughter of city Public Works employee Gail Ultz and Code Enforcement Officer Ron Ultz, both of Athens, received a stomach, pancreas, spleen, liver, and small and large intestines from a 9-year-old donor in 15-hour transplant surgery.

“I take 40 pills a day, but that’s a small price to pay for a brand new life,” said Sara from her father’s home Friday.



Life interrupted

Sara was living in Birmingham, working for a health care management firm and was just four classes away from earning her masters in business administration in Birmingham, in August 2005 when she experienced a severe stomachache. A friend took her to Brookwood Hospital emergency room and doctors determined that she had a bowel obstruction and the small intestine had looped around itself.

“This is a possible complication of gastric bypass surgery that Sara had several years ago,” said Ron Ultz.

She had emergency surgery the next day at 6 a.m. and surgery every day for three days. She wound up with 18 inches of small intestine. Doctors removed half of the small intestine in the first surgery, but the remaining intestine continued to die, so on the second day, doctors removed half of what was left, and the third day removed all but 18 inches.

Sara was in the hospital for 6 1/2 weeks the first time and then came back to Athens to live with her mother. Gail Ultz cared for her daughter, administering painful blood-thinning injections and intravenous feedings. She also received home health care visits.

She was in and out of the hospital several more times and when doctors attempted to reattach the remaining 18 inches of small intestines they discovered that portion had also died.

Sara contemplated a lifetime of being connected to an ostemy bag.



Call for help

Ron Ultz’s frantic Internet search for someone to help his daughter in the wee hours of the morning last fall drew response from a doctor considered to be the leading transplant surgeon in the world.

“Sara hates the ostemy bag with a passion,” said Ron. “I got on the Internet and typed in ‘large/small intestine transplant.’ I sent out some 15 e-mails and within 30 minutes I got an e-mail back from Dr. Andreas Tzakis.”

Tzakis, a world-renowned transplant surgeon and former director of University of Pittsburgh’s Pediatric Liver and Intestinal Transplant Programs, joined the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1994 as co-director of the Division of Transplantation and as director of the Surgery Department’s newly created Division of Liver and Intestinal Transplantation. Tzakis is considered the leading transplant surgeon in the world.

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 for both children and adults.

Tzakis agreed to perform a multi-visceral transplant on Sara when a donor became available.

In the meantime, Sara attended a Fraternal Order of Police state meeting with Ron in Montgomery. It was while they were in Montgomery that they got a call from Miami that a donor had been found.



Donor found

“We had a 46-hour window,” said Ron, who was unable to book a commercial flight from Montgomery to Miami. “I got in touch with a guy at Huntsville Aviation to charter a private flight. The cost was $14,000. Sara had a credit card and charged $7,000 to it and I charged $7,000 on my credit card and an hour later we were on our way.”

However, when Ron and Sara got to Miami, they learned the donor was not suitable, after all, because the liver was diseased or damaged.

“We stayed until Monday and then flew home,” said Ron. “But then, 12 hours later, they said come back.”

This time the donor was a 9-year-old boy and the organs were healthy and Sara had the surgery. Two days later, she was back in the operating room for another 12-hours of surgery.

Sara was to remain in the hospital for the next six months. However, the bowel would not function properly. Doctors feared another sequence of events in which the whole transplanted system would die.

“They thought they would have to re-do the surgery,” said Ron. “They said they would try a new medicine, but it probably wouldn’t work. I asked them how often they had to re-do this kind of surgery and they said eight times. I asked them how many of those lived and they said only two had survived. That meant there was a 75-percent failure rate.”

Sara was given the choice of doing nothing and probably succumbing to her condition, or going ahead with more transplants with a slim chance of survival. She opted for the surgery and had planned to come home to say good-bye to her dog and friends in case she didn’t make it through the transplant.

“But they tried that new drug, Periactin, and it immediately started working,” said Ultz. “I mean we were literally within days of surgery, that’s how close it came. She got to come home on April 14.”



Long road ahead

Sara has a scheduled “tune-up” in Miami for June 11-14. In the meantime, Sara goes weekly to the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital’s Kirkland Clinic. There, doctors insert a scope into her ostemy to check the bowel for signs of rejection or deterioration.

“The bowel is not working at 100 percent,” said Ron. “Sara has a catheter in her chest where she receives a days worth of calories every night, but it is very hard on her liver. She also has to have two bags of saline a day because of dehydration.”

The cost of Sara’s surgeries, treatments, medications and diet supplements are astronomical.

“The scary thing about it is I had gotten another job at Health Spring and I was serving out the last week of my two-week notice when I got sick,” said Sara. “If it had happened three days later I would have had no insurance. I’ve been approved for Social Security long-term disability. The company will have to make a COBRA policy available to me for 11 more months and then Medicare will pick up.”

Ron said the national organization of the Fraternal Order of Police had donated $20,000 and he had also gotten a lot of help from the local F.O.P. But now, at least, with the success of Sara’s latest round of medication, the family can see some hope.

“Through all of this, I’ve learned all the medical jargon,” said Ron, his eyes watering as he gazes on his daughter. “They told us there would be good days and bad days, so enjoy the good days while you can. But on the bad days it was like sitting there and watching your child die.”