Taylor Sherrouse will leave Texas Children’s Hospital no later than early next week able to do what she hasn’t for a long time: eat heartily, breathe on her own and walk without a struggle.

Sherrouse, a 17-year-old Brenham resident with cystic fibrosis, has what her doctors described Wednesday as “a new lease on life” following a rare triple-organ transplant in late June. During a 13-hour operation, they replaced her heart, lungs and liver — only the third time in the past decade a U.S. pediatric patient has received those organs in a single transplant.

“It was scary, exciting, all the emotions you can imagine,” said Sherrouse, describing her initial reaction when doctors told about the surgery. “But I feel great now and can’t wait to go home and be with my family again.”

She said she looks forward to finishing high school, going to culinary school and becoming a chef.

The organs all came from a single donor, about whom doctors provided no information. They became available in the dawn hours of June 22, just 11 days after Taylor went on the United Network for Organ Sharing waiting list. Her team acknowledged such a short wait was remarkable.

12-year patient

Sherrouse has been a Texas Children’s patient for 12 years, treated frequently during that time for recurring liver problems and respiratory infections as a result of her cystic fibrosis, an inherited disease that occurs in about one out of 3,000 live births. She has been in the hospital the past eight months as her condition worsened.

Sherrouse still has cystic fibrosis, but it cannot return in the transplanted organs, doctors said.

The biggest challenge will be rejection issues involving the transplanted organs, said Dr. Jeffrey Heinle, who performed the heart and lung portion of the transplant. She will be on immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of her life.

No long-term predictions

The average survival is 14 years for pediatric heart transplant patients and five for pediatric lung transplant patients, but Heinle said it’s impossible to predict how long Sherrouse will live. He said recent data suggests the fact the organs all came from the same patient may confer some protection.

Heinle said that without the transplant, Sherrouse probably wouldn’t have lived another six months.

Admitted to Texas Children’s with a lung infection early last November, Sherrouse had hoped to come home by Thanksgiving. But she was never able to leave as her liver and lungs got progressively worse and cardiologists diagnosed restrictive cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the muscle is stiff and chambers can’t fill properly with blood. The condition is not associated with cystic fibrosis.

Doctors told the family the triple-organ transplant was Sherrouse’s best hope, but they warned she might get too sick for the surgery by the time she moved to the top of the list. At the time, she was oxygen-dependent, fed intravenously and through a tube and struggled to walk.

‘Amazing’ recovery

The proposed transplant required many ethical discussions at the hospital because the organs instead could have gone to three patients and, even after learning of the organs’ availability, doctors left open the possibility the liver could go to another patient if the initial heart-lung transplant went poorly.

But the nine-hour heart-and-double-lung transplant went well, and Dr. John Goss followed up with a 3 1/2-hour liver transplant, the 1,000th of his career.

So “amazing” has been Sherrouse’s recovery, said pulmonologist Dr. George Mallory, that she was walking within a week and eating like rarely before within two. Sherrouse talked proudly Wednesday of meals of burritos, sausage, eggs and hash browns from McDonald’s.

“I feel very lucky, very grateful,” said Sherrouse, still attached to a few tubes Wednesday morning but scheduled to have them removed later in the day. “Only two other (such patients) than me — that’s really something.”

todd.ackerman@chron.com