A Maryland daughter has now donated two organs to her mother in what doctors are calling an extreme medical rarity. Eileen Harlin, the daughter, told Fox News Digital about donating organs to her mother, Julia, “The decision-making was super simple. I was doing it as long as I knew I was a match.” Both transplants, a partial liver in 2022 and a kidney in December, were conducted at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.
Dr. Daniel Maluf, a transplant surgeon at UMMC who operated on the mom and daughter, told Fox News it was a “unique event” for a patient to donate two organs. He said, “It’s a rare thing. I think that, eventually, in the future, it will be done more as we become more confident. I would highlight the fact that [Eileen] seemed to be completely selfless and very caring about the mother, which is really just to be congratulated, and I think that she’s the real hero of this story.”
Several years ago, Julia found out that her liver was failing. She had a condition known as nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) cirrhosis, and her only path to survival was through a liver transplant. She had two options: the first was to wait for a deceased donor who matched her blood type, but this process can often be long, given that there are thousands on the wait list for the same type of transplant. Dr. Maluf said it would have taken 8-10 years for the kidney.
He said, “Most of the patients, when they get to that age, kind of the only option is to have a living donor, to find somebody that will give an organ. Otherwise, they will sit on the waiting list for a long time and get dialysis.” In an interview with Fox News Digital, Julia said, “I told my children I didn’t want them to even apply. I didn’t want to worry about them and something going wrong. I would feel like, oh, they’re doing something for me, and something happened.” Eileen, 39, along with two of her siblings, applied to be living donors, with their mother unaware that this process was underway.
“It was a surprise,” Julia said in an interview. “At that point, I was getting worse and worse, and I was having to go through a lot of procedures, like once a week.” After a few months, it was determined that Eileen was indeed a match. She told her parents the news, and the liver transplant took place on August 16, 2022. The transplant served Julia well until she began to experience kidney failure. Eileen was once again tested and was a match for a kidney transplant.
Eileen said, “We’ve always had such a strong bond, I guess more now that you’ve got some of my organs in there. We’ve always been close. Recovery, I think we’re both doing really well. Slowly but surely, we’re getting there. A little swollen, but we’re moving.”