Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Inside, Your Health
When former New York Jets running back Dennis Bligen was diagnosed with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) in 2011, and told by doctors that he needed a new kidney, the news came as a shock.
For his long-time friend, Jill Christensen—who worked with him in the athletics department at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y.—the news was a call to action. “I just knew I would get tested [to become a donor],” she says. But it turned out that Ms. Christensen’s kidneys were not an appropriate match.
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Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Inside, Your Health
It was the longest drive of Kelly Smith’s life: four hours in an ambulance from Syracuse, N.Y., to The Mount Sinai Hospital beside her 9-day-old daughter, Matilda, who was critically ill. Seemingly healthy on the day she was born in early September, Matilda had become lethargic and sick after nursing only a few days later. Tests in Syracuse revealed acute neonatal liver failure—a rare, life-threatening condition. Matilda’s best hope was a liver transplant.
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Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Inside, Your Health
Three years ago, Sharon Jones began knitting as a way to ease the pain she felt after losing her 17-year-old son Andrew in a car crash in 2007. “When you lose a child, it doesn’t go away,” says Ms. Jones, a Manager of Grants and Contracts in The Mount Sinai Medical Center’s Department of Pediatrics. “The knitting keeps me thinking about something else.”
The knowledge that Andrew was an organ donor, who helped many recipients, provides solace, as well. So when Ms. Jones recently learned about “Sean’s Gift,” a national initiative to give handmade blankets to the families of deceased organ donors, she decided to turn the lunchtime knitting club she had started at Mount Sinai a year-and-a-half ago into a similar initiative here.
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Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Health Tips, Inside, Your Health
Every 15 hours, someone in New York State dies waiting for an organ transplant. The shortage of available organs is so severe that in 2012, as many as 9,914 people were listed as waiting for transplants in New York State, for which there were only 358 deceased donors and 481 living donors, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. One donor can save up to eight lives.
The New York Organ Donor Network (NYODN), a federally designated organ procurement organization, and one of the nation’s largest, serves a diverse population of 13 million people in the New York metropolitan area. The organization facilitates donation with The Mount Sinai Medical Center’s Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute, nine other transplant centers, and more than 90 hospitals in the region.
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Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Geriatrics, OB/GYN, Urogynecology, Women's Health
There have been a lot of media reports (as well as lawyer ads) lately about mesh implants used in gynecological surgery to treat pelvic organ prolapse. What is all the fuss about?
In 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning about “mesh implants” and “slings” used to treat stress incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse in women. In 2011, the agency issued a stronger warning against the use of mesh implants placed vaginally to treat pelvic organ prolapse. To understand what this all means, it is important to know the history. (more…)
