Sometimes, the people who save your life come from the most unexpected places. For Sonya Bradley, it was her daughter’s best friend, who donated part of her liver at Vanderbilt University Medical Center one year ago to replace Bradley’s failing one.
In summer 2024, Bradley, a resident of Elizabethton in East Tennessee, was dying from liver failure and needed a transplant to live. At the Vanderbilt Transplant Center (VTC), she had two options. Option one: Wait on a transplant list until a matching organ was found. She could die if a matching organ couldn’t be located in time.
Option two: Pursue a transplant through VTC’s living donor liver transplant program, which allows relatives and friends to donate part of their healthy liver to their loved one with liver failure, something only possible at select medical centers in the country. The resulting partial livers in the donor and recipient can regenerate to become fully functional organs.
When Bradley learned that a living donation was possible, she pursued that option.
There are not enough deceased donor livers for those who need one, and people on the transplant list often wait months to years to receive an organ from a deceased donor. A donation from a living donor can significantly shorten the amount of time a recipient must wait to receive a transplant.
With living donor liver transplants, surgery is scheduled in advance, at the donor and recipient’s convenience. The recipient can get a liver before becoming too sick, often within weeks if they have a compatible living donor.
Potential donors are screened in a multistep process, including a questionnaire, a visit with a donor advocate and a medical evaluation. To donate a liver, an individual must be at least 18 and healthy enough to donate the liver.
In Bradley’s case, one relative immediately volunteered to donate and went through a battery of tests to determine if the liver was a match. It wasn’t. But Bradley’s daughter’s best friend from childhood, Meghan Moretz, also decided to get tested.
“And she turned out to be my match,” Bradley said.
She recalled the day she found out, when she opened her door and saw Moretz, who lives hours away in North Carolina, standing outside her home.
“She’s standing there with the sign that says we’re a perfect match, and I’m going to be your liver donor. Hope you don’t mind.”
Bradley was in shock. She had been sick for years. “I stayed so tired I just wanted to sleep all the time and was constantly sick with my stomach. I had yellowing in the eyes and skin.”
It got so bad she had diagnostic testing in January 2024. Bradley said her platelet level was “rock bottom low,” revealing her liver failure. She came under the care of Roman Perri, MD, assistant professor of Medicine and medical director of Liver Transplantation at VUMC.
After the shock of learning Moretz wanted to be her donor, “I made Meghan sit down and talk with me because I didn’t want her to feel like she was obligated,” Bradley said.
Moretz had been in her life since she was 14, Bradley said. “You’ve got a whole life to live,” she recalls telling Moretz.
Moretz wasn’t having it. “She said, ‘Sonya, I’ve read all about it. It’s going to be OK.’”
The process is free for people who step up to become living organ donors. The evaluation is free, and if one becomes a donor, the surgery, hospital stay and follow-up visits are free, too. The VTC’s team of physicians, nurse coordinators, donor advocates and social workers work closely with donors about eligibility, health considerations and any other concerns.
Though there is a recovery period, a living liver donor can expect a normal, healthy life.
For Moretz, it was a no-brainer. If she could save her best friend’s mom’s life, she would.
“I never once questioned whether or not I was going to do it or wanted to do it, and I never was nervous about it,” she said.
Once Moretz was approved to be a match, it was a matter of the VTC scheduling two surgeries on the same day in August 2024 — one removing part of the liver from Moretz and another transplanting the partial liver into Bradley.
The operations were successful. Both Bradley and Moretz have recovered well and recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of the transplant. Bradley credits her Vanderbilt care team, starting with Perri.
“His care is excellent,” she said. “I could not ask for a better doctor. He makes sure you understand everything. And he explains things that can happen. I couldn’t have had a better team.”
Perri said, “Caring for patients with liver disease through the transplant process is an incredibly rewarding experience. We have so much gratitude for donors, who selflessly provide the means by which our patients can return to health.”
Moretz is upfront about the recovery from a living donor liver procedure; she said it’s hard at first. There is some pain and lethargy. She said it took about two months to begin to feel like herself and another couple of months to feel completely back to normal. Being a liver donor isn’t for everybody, she said, but for her it was worth it.
“It’s a cool thing to know that I was able to help her,” she said. “The way that she was going kind of downhill, I don’t know if she would have even been here after Christmas (2024), because it was getting pretty bad. And now, she looks the best that she’s looked in years … It’s really nice to see.”
