Seventeen-year-old Shelby Standridge came down with common colds early in her childhood, but nothing out of the ordinary. A severe nose bleed at age 9, however, landed her in the hospital and prompted questions from her parents about the cause of her unexpected illness.
Doctors in her hometown in Alabama thankfully ruled out leukemia, but did a test for cystic fibrosis, which came back positive. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder that affects mostly the lungs, but also the pancreas, liver, kidneys and intestine.
At the time doctors tested Shelby for the disease, they determined her liver was already fully involved, almost to the point of end-stage liver failure. She wasn’t yet a candidate for transplant, however, so she continued battling the disease over the next five years. Throughout the past couple of years, though, Shelby’s parents and older sister noticed her lung function was declining.
“Her life had become narrow,” Shelby’s mom, Teresa Standridge, recalled.
As a result, Shelby and her family were referred to Texas Children’s, home to one of the largest pediatric transplantation programs in the nation. The team performed 86 solid organ transplants in 2015, making the program the most active pediatric transplant program in the U.S. last year.
Shelby, her mom, and older sister, Olivia, moved to Houston in October so she could be listed for a double lung and a liver transplant. A grueling wait that was expected to last six to eight months, was a mere week as Shelby underwent a 14-hour lung-liver transplant on November 8.
A multidisciplinary team of surgeons performed the procedure which is deemed so uncommon that Texas Children’s has done, including Shelby, only six of these cases since the inception of the transplant program.
“Shelby’s case is quite unusual,” said the teenager’s pulmonologist Dr. Ernestina Melicoff-Portillo. “There are only a small number of cystic fibrosis patients who have both lungs and the liver affected.”
Now, two weeks post-transplant, Shelby is feeling “ten times better” than she did and “can enjoy more in everyday life.” Her dad, Brian Standridge, noted that he hasn’t seen her grin so wide in years.
Dr. John Goss, medical director of Transplant Services, said the expertise of and the collaboration with the clinical staff and the two different surgical teams are what made Shelby’s outcome a success.
“This type of procedure only could happen at a place like Texas Children’s where our transplant program continues to earn its reputation as one of the best pediatric transplant programs in the country,” he said.
Click here to watch KHOU 11 News’ story about Shelby’s dual-organ transplant.