A Utah woman is hepatitis free after getting a piece of her son’s liver in a lifesaving transplant.
“I feel like we are gaining ground every day. Starting to hope and dream and thinking about the future,” Gwen Finlayson told CNN affiliate KTVX.
The 63-year-old mother of four was diagnosed in 1991 with autoimmune hepatitis, which is caused by the body’s immune system turning against the liver cells. Doctors warned that she would need a liver transplant in a few years, but she was able to stretch that to more than two decades.
“I would go to the hospital and stay. I wasn’t getting over things,” she said. “There were a lot of indications that this was going south in a hurry.”
Finlayson went on the national transplant list last year, but the odds of her getting an organ looked pretty slim.
Her son, Brandon, was a match and volunteered to be a donor. But she didn’t want to put him at risk since he has five kids of his own.
“She pretty much shut us down and said, ‘No, it’s not a possibility. I don’t even want to talk about it,’ ” Brandon, 37, said. “It took days to get her to finally even think about the idea. A lot of convincing.”
“I’m not sure I have the words to describe how I feel about my son. I am grateful that he is the kind of man who would do something like that,” she said. “That he would risk his life for another human being — didn’t have to be his mother — it would have been anybody. To me, that is the definition of a hero.”
Brandon joked that he was probably off the hook for Mother’s Day gifts for at least a few years.
Son donates part of his liver to his mom, jokes he’s off the hook for Mother’s Day gifts
A Utah woman is hepatitis free after getting a piece of her son’s liver in a lifesaving transplant. “I feel like we are gaining ground every day. Starting to hope and dream and thinking…
wgntv.com