Grandmother gives Brady a special gift

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

Four days after Suzanne Callander gave a quarter of her liver to her baby grandson Brady, they touched fingers through his cot and she burst into tears.

It was their special greeting.

She had taught him the "ET hello", derived from the movie, when he first learned to point his little finger.

Brady, then 16 months old, was in his cot, hooked up to medical machines at Starship children's hospital. His grandmother had been pushed in by wheelchair from Auckland Hospital.

"He turned his head and I just reached out. The only communication I could have with him was to touch his little finger. He lifted his hand and touched my finger through the cot.

"He smiled. It was pretty special. We were together again."

In January, when the two operations took place, Brady was the youngest child to have a liver transplant in New Zealand - and only the second liver patient in the country to rely on a living donor.

The surgery was delayed by a radiographers' strike.

Brady had been afflicted since birth by a rare condition called biliary atresia, in which there are insufficient ducts to drain bile from the liver. An operation to correct it was unsuccessful.

The condition affected his development: he was unable to crawl and had to be fed mostly through a nose tube to his stomach.

Now aged 23 months, he and 55-year-old Mrs Callander, both from Tauranga, have recovered and are in good health.

"Brady's doing exceptionally well," she said. "He's your typical 2-year-old healthy Kiwi kid who has got all the energy in the world. We call him '90 miles an hour' because he doesn't stop." Brady had in effect stopped growing, but was now catching up.

"He has to take anti-rejection drugs for life but that's a minor price to pay for having life."

Asked why she decided to undergo the risky operation, Mrs Callander said: "We were getting desperate."

Brady was on the waiting list for a piece of liver from a deceased donor, but was deteriorating and would have died without a transplant.

Her husband at first had reservations, but came round "when I said, 'he's my grandson and I could never forgive myself if I could help him and he died'."

Mrs Callander's personal experience of the shortage of organ donors in New Zealand has added weight to a campaign for changes.

Today, alongside lawyer Sir Geoffrey Palmer, she will speak to a Parliamentary committee considering a petition pushing for changes to increase the number of people who become donors after they die.

She urges that New Zealand change to a system, widely used in Europe, that presumes each person agrees to donate their organs on death unless they leave written instructions to the contrary.

In New Zealand, people can state on their drivers' licences that they wish to become donors, but this can be overridden by their families.

Organ transplants

* Last year, the waiting list for organ transplants stood at 400 people.

* Only 38 deceased people became donors, a rate of 9.5 per million people.

* The rate in Spain, which has a presumed consent law, is 39.6 per million, the world's highest.