In Their Honor
Performing the everyday miracle
When Bob Merion, M.D., describes the first liver transplant performed at U-M in the mid-80s, he remembers the surgery took about 17 hours. There were only a handful of hospitals doing liver transplants and Merion had just completed a twoyear fellowship in England to learn the delicate process of taking a donor organ, connecting it to a patient, sending oxygen and blood through it and watching a miracle take place. What strikes Merion now is how many people appeared in the team photo after the successful operation—about 40.
“There isn’t a typical kind of person who works in transplant, but the one constant is that you’re always part of a team,” says Merion, professor of surgery, U-M Transplant Center. “It’s a multidisciplinary field and involves everyone from the surgeon to physicians to coordinators, social workers, P.A.s, perfusionists and dietitians.” Together, the team performs “the everyday miracle,” a phrase coined by Jeff Punch, U-M Transplantation Division director, to describe the process of giving a patient a second chance for a healthy life.
Still, the transplant community is a small and tight-knit group. Merion was participating in a meeting overseas when news came about the loss of the transplant team after their plane crashed last June. He quickly revised his presentation to include a slide honoring his six colleagues.
“It wasn’t just a plane with six people, it was a plane with six friends. There was tremendous sympathy and an outpouring of support about the loss of our teammates,” Merion says.
Merion now works in memory of his friends and is reminded of them daily. In surgery, he thinks of fellow surgeons Martin Spoor and David Ashburn. He is reminded of Ricky LaPensee and Richard Chenault when he hands an organ to a perfusionist. And when he’s flying, he is reminded of pilots Dennis Hoyes and Bill Serra. Merion is a pilot himself and is part of the U-M Flyers club. He flies for enjoyment and tries to get up in the air every few weeks.
Merion spends much of his time advancing transplant medicine through research on living donors and long-term health outcomes, including a federally-funded program to help living donors recoup travel costs and pursuing legislative changes on behalf of his patients. He says it’s the approximately 98,000 people waiting for a transplant that drives those in transplant medicine to risk their lives to save others.
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