Transplants

Joan Corbin's day is governed by the humming box in the alcove off her living room. For nearly an hour in the afternoon and nine hours at night, the Smith Island resident must tether herself to a suitcase-sized dialysis machine to get rid of the waste building up in her body. A healthy person's kidneys would perform that vital chore. But Corbin's gave out long ago, after being damaged by infections in her youth. She got a new kidney from her older brother 13 years ago at the University of Maryland Medical Center, which restored her health for a time.

Gene Cassidy thought he was lucky to survive being shot in the head twice 25 years ago when he was a Baltimore policeman, so a second near-death ordeal recently seemed unreal. Just 27 years old, Cassidy lost his sight after a man he was trying to arrest on an assault warrant fired at him. The shooting, and his survival, made Cassidy a legend in Baltimore police ranks and became fodder for "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," the book by David Simon, and later a TV series, about crime in Baltimore.

When you grow up taking care of other people, it's understandable that you might put taking care of yourself last on the list. Until, of course, you absolutely have to put yourself on the list. The kidney transplant list. A colleague, Carla Hubbard, spoke frankly with me about this over lunch recently. I asked if she would let me interview her when I found myself standing at the strange intersection of the people I work for and the people I work with at the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Johns Hopkins doctors have received approval from the university's institutional review board to begin doing face transplant surgeries, becoming the second hospital in Baltimore to offer the complex procedure. There have been only 22 such operations around the world, including the most extensive one ever performed earlier this year at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center. Read details in this Baltimore Sun story . The procedures now can include not only tissue but underlying bones from a donor.

In the long lull before the Republican National Convention in Tampa in late August, party leaders and strategists for Mitt Romney are calculating how they can put their collective best foot forward. This year, it will not be easy. The usual centerpieces of the event are the selection of the presidential nominee and the choice of a running mate; however, the first piece is already clear, and the second may well be known before the delegates gather. In any event, Mitt Romney being certifiably cautious, there seems little chance he will drop a firecracker of the sort John McCain tossed in four years ago with his selection of the combustible Sarah Palin.

Jim Duquette and his daughter Lindsey are recovering after the former Orioles executive donated his kidney to the 10-year-old earlier this month. Lindsey suffers from a rare kidney disorder with no known cure, focal segmental glomerulosclerosis , that destroyed her kidneys, creating the need for the transplant. The transplant won't necessarily cure Lindsey and there is a 50 percent chance the disease will attack the new organs. But the family is hoping it could put her in a form of remission.

A fist-sized contraption of plastic and metal kept 63-year-old Grant Feusner alive for five weeks earlier this year, pumping blood from his chest to his brain, kidneys and muscles. Doctors had removed most of Feusner's heart, ballooned with disease and too weak to nourish his organs with oxygen and nutrients. It wasn't the first time Feusner's doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center had implanted such a device. Artificial hearts are designed to be used as a bridge from heart failure to heart transplant.

Lindsey Duquette and her father, former Orioles executive Jim Duquette, have come through their transplant surgeries and are recovering at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a spokesperson for the hospital said Monday. The father gave his daughter a kidney after her organs were destroyed by a rare disease called focal segmental glomerulosclerosis . Both are listed in fair condition, the hospital said.  There is no cure for the disease that is diagnosed in only 5,400 people a year.

For the first time in the six years since Victoria Chakwin was diagnosed with a deadly lung disease, the gown she wears won't be hospital issue. The 18-year-old from Martinsburg, W.Va., will go to her senior prom Saturday night in a red-and-black number she found on the Internet. A rite of passage for most teens, the event is more momentous for Victoria - who's known as Tori - because people diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis generally live only three to five years. That she is headed to her prom demonstrates not only the possibilities of modern medicine but the will of the teen and her mother, according to Tori's doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center, who in late January replaced her scarred, dysfunctional lungs with a donor set. "We can do a lot with technology, if we're not afraid to use it," said Dr. Aldo T. Iacono, medical director of Maryland's lung transplant program, one of the few in the country that will transplant scarce organs into someone so sick.

When Richard Lee Norris opened his eyes after a marathon 36-hour surgery to give him a new face, he immediately wanted a mirror. A natural reaction for a man who had been practically living as a recluse since a 1997 gun accident took off his nose, chin, lips and teeth, said doctors from the University of Maryland who had just performed the world's most extensive face transplant on the 37-year-old from Hillsville, Va. Norris is relearning to...