Allie Driva was born with a massively swollen stomach and yellow-tinged skin and eyes. Her parents, Ryan and Analisia Driva, assumed their daughter had jaundice. When Allie’s condition didn’t change, they took her back to the doctors.
They were quick to diagnose Allie with biliary atresia, a condition where the bile fails to drain out of the liver, causing the liver to become damaged and potentially fail.
“If you touched her stomach, you could feel her liver,” Driva recalled. “It was rock-hard when it should have been soft.”
The future didn’t look optimistic. Allie would have to have a liver transplant soon, or she would die. “It was terrifying,” Driva said.
Allie was placed on the waiting list for a liver transplant, but her condition deteriorated faster than doctors could find a donor liver.
Desperately seeking another solution, doctors proposed that Allie find a donor who could offer a live transplant; instead of taking an entire organ from a deceased donor, part of the organ could be taken from a live donor.
Once the doctors changed tactics, they quickly discovered that Driva himself was a match.
“Learning that I could save my daughter was the happiest moment of my life,” he said. “I would have done anything to save her.”
The process of transferring part of Driva’s liver to Allie, however, was intensely complicated. Driva had to undergo a six-hour procedure to have the left of his liver removed. This piece of his liver was then put on ice and drive to the children’s hospital where Allie was staying, two hours away.
The entire time, Analisia and the Driva’s older daughter, Ava, waited anxiously.
Thankfully, the procedures – for both Driva and Allie – were successful.
Driva was unable to walk for a few days, but once he was well, he was ecstatic about holding his little girl again. “She recovered so well and I saw the whites of her eyes for the first time and her skin was fair,” he remembered.
A year after Allie’s successful transplant, Driva decided to share a photo of her failed liver online to encourage more people to become live donors.
