 "Photo: Courtney Dudley; The Daily Texan")
 "Photo: Courtney Dudley; The Daily Texan")
 "Photo: Courtney Dudley; The Daily Texan")
 "Photo: Courtney Dudley; The Daily Texan")
 "Photo: Courtney Dudley; The Daily Texan")
In the late evening of Sept. 11, before Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast, two liver transplant patients arrived in separate helicopters at Austin’s Seton Medical Center after being evacuated from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Crammed into one of the helicopters with barely enough room for a gurney, the
doctors were forced to leave most of their monitoring equipment behind.
“Initally, the idea was to ride out the storm, but as the storm started turning and it became clearer that it was going to hit Galveston, then the order came that we had to evacuate the patients,” said Dr. Philip Thomas, a liver transplant surgeon. “The question was, ‘Where?’”
As the surge rose higher, UTMB was flooded with more than 10 feet of water and lost electricity. But the patients were already safe on the ground in Austin, 24 hours before the brunt of the storm hit.
“We had two patients that were transplanted only a few days prior to the arrival of the storm. In fact, one of them was only 48 hours out of surgery when we were asked to evacuate the hospital because the storm was actually coming in our direction,” said Luca Cicalese, director of the UTMB Texas Transplant Center. “Of course these were very fragile patients, just transplanted.”
Although Seton does not have a liver transplant unit on site, they opened their doors to the fragile, unconscious patients and quickly began working with the doctors from UTMB to provide adequate care for the recovering patients.
“They took 90 patients between here and Seton North West, which is a phenomenal number of patients to try and absorb in a very short period of time,” said Dr. Michael Shapiro, a pulmonary critical care medic.
One of the liver transplant patients flown in by helicopter, Jesus Ayala, made a quick recovery, Thomas said.
Ayala’s wife Barbara and his sister Lydia McGuire were by his side during the entire transplant but were confused about what to do when they heard they had to evacuate and leave Ayala alone.
Barbara said she was nervous because she knew her husband didn’t know what was going on, but felt better when she saw the doctor.
“I was like ‘Wow, what a blessing to have your physician fly with you. That was great,’” she said.
Although the move was rough on the family, they said they were relieved when they arrived in Austin and were allowed to see Ayala.
“After that, it was smooth sailing,” Barbara said.
In hindsight, the doctors and administration at UTMB said they made the right decisions under unusually stressful circumstances with the help of experience from similar evacuations during Hurricane Rita. More than 200 patients were evacuated during both storms.
“It’s not the kind of experience you like to have, but we did have experience, and the state response has been excellent then and I think even more smooth this time,” said Courtney Townsend, chairman of UTMB’s Department of Surgery, who stayed in the hospital during the Rita evacuation. “I don’t think it could have gone any better.”
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Emad Asham, M.D., Transplant and Hepatobioliary Surgeon, UTMB