SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Michael Dotto, a 19-year-old from Baldwinsville, will eat Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, five months after a bowel transplant allowed him to eat solid food for the first time in his life.

Dotto was born with intestinal neuronal dysplasia, a rare disease that made him unable to digest food or eat. When Dotto was a day old, doctors at Crouse Hospital inserted a central line, or tube, into one of his veins to provide all the vitamins, minerals and calories his body needed, bypassing the gastrointestinal tract.

Dotto was fed like that until June 20 when a surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City removed nearly all his intestines that didn’t work and replaced them with the intestines of a 12-year-old boy who died of a brain aneurysm. Mount Sinai is one of 15 active intestine transplant centers in the U.S.

Dotto ate his first slice of pizza before the hospital sent him home.

Michael Dotto has his first piece of pizza post surgery with Dr. Iyer, his transplant surgeon.Provided photo

He’s eager to chow down on turkey tomorrow when he celebrates the holiday with his parents and relatives in Pittsburgh.

“I will fill up my plate with as much food as I can handle,” he said.

In addition to letting him eat, the surgery freed him from being tethered every night to a machine that pumped liquid nutrition into his body. From the time he was a baby, a home care nurse had to be with him at night to make sure the pump was working properly and help him to the bathroom.

“It’s nice to be able to go out with friends and not have to worry about getting home on time to get connected to the machine,” he said. “It gives me a lot of freedom.”

Because of his health issues, Dotto could never go on sleepovers, play sports or go swimming.

“He didn’t know the joy of eating and drinking,” said Dr. Kishore Iyer, the transplant surgeon. “Think of one thing you do socially that does not involve food and drink.”

Before the surgery, Dotto could occasionally taste a tablespoon of food or take a sip of a drink. But consuming much more than that would make him sick.

If he went to a restaurant with friends or family, Dotto said he would order a small item from the menu “just to have something in front of me.”

“I would just play with it and take it home,” he said.

Dotto used to crave cooked rotisserie chickens after smelling them in the grocery store. “I always wanted to try one,” he said.

Now that he can eat solid food, grilled chicken is his favorite meal.

Despite the limitations of his chronic disease, Dotto went to school in Baldwinsville, traveled with his family to Italy, France and Brazil, worked part-time as a cashier at Wegmans and started taking classes at Le Moyne College. “We tried to make his life as normal as possible,” said Karina Dotto, his mother.

He was doing well until 2016 when he began to experience chronic gastrointestinal bleeding. He spent half of his senior year of high school in bed or the hospital.

Iyer started seeing Dotto when he was a baby. The doctor initially advised Dotto’s parents against a bowel transplant because the procedure is risky and the boy was doing well on liquid nutrition. But he changed his mind when the bleeding got worse.

“There didn’t seem to be any prospect of making him better without a transplant,” Iyer said. “What we do with transplants is trade one life-threatening condition for one that hopefully is not and allows long term survival with good quality of life.”

Dotto went on the transplant list in March and got a call at 11 p.m. June 18, informing him the transplant team had an organ for him. Within an hour Dotto and his family were in their car. They arrived at the New York hospital at 5 a.m.

Another surgeon who works with Iyer traveled out of state to remove the organ from the donor. Meanwhile Iyer prepared Dotto for surgery at Mount Sinai. The transplant team’s goal is to make sure there’s no more than six to eight hours between the time blood flow to the organ stops in the donor to the time blood flow resumes in the recipient. “It’s an intricate well-orchestrated dance between different teams performing critical operations,” Iyer said.

The transplant took about 12 hours. Dotto was in the hospital for a month.

During the first year after the transplant, Dotto cannot eat in restaurants because his immune system is weak as his body adjusts to the new organ. He also can’t eat spicy food or much sugar yet. Those restrictions will be lifted after a year.

As part of his recovery regimen, Dotto must eat three meals and seven to eight snacks a day, plus 2 ½ liters of Gatorade. He’s supposed to consume at least 2,100 calories daily.

Later next year he hopes to resume his part-time job at Wegmans and his studies at Le Moyne. His goal is to become a physician assistant.

Before Dotto left Mount Sinai, Iyer joined him for a celebratory piece of pizza.

“I’m not even sure that he enjoyed pizza,” Iyer said. “But for the first time he enjoyed the experience of saying, ‘Let’s have a pizza.’ ”

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