Markus DeJong sits up in his hospital bed, smiles and lifts his grey sweatshirt to reveal a scar that stretches wide across his little belly like the red outline of a rising sun.
The family calls his angry red stitches "train tracks." For the little two-year-old, they're a one-of-a-kind gift from Dad.
"No more owies," Markus told reporters Friday at the Stollery Children's Hospital, which has now completed 14 liver transplants on children this year but needs more donors at a time when help is dropping off.
His parents - Mark DeJong and Tanya Visser of Lethbridge, Alta. - said he was healthy at birth but after three weeks became irritable and wouldn't sleep.
The boy's skin colour was jaundiced and when it got worse, they sought help.
"He was green like Baby Hulk," said Tanya, holding her son at his bedside.
He was diagnosed with a tumour that kept growing and threatened to become cancerous. Time was a factor.
Mark, a 30-year-old oil worker in the southern Alberta city, said the waiting list for a donor was up to two years. Tests showed he was a compatible donor. He didn't hesitate to agree to the operation, which was done Nov. 6.
"It came to the time that they had to do it," he said. "His health could have faded quite drastically.
"The tumour was the size of a mandarin orange and it was pressing against the kidneys, causing blood-flow problems."
Part of Mark's liver was removed but will grow back in two months.
"It's the most fabulous gift that a parent could give at the holiday season. Markus got discharged out of hospital on Christmas Eve," said hepatologist Susan Gilmour, the doctor in charge.
Gilmour said while Markus will be on drugs the rest of his life to prevent his body from rejecting the transplant and must continually guard against infections, he should be able to lead a healthy, normal life.
"They're in preschool, they're in school, they're in swimming lessons, they belong to Cubs. We have patients who are on select hockey teams," she said.
Gilmour said the procedure is somewhat rare - only about one in four child patients have a parent who is compatible in blood and size to be able to donate a liver.
She said getting donors is still one of the big hurdles for the Stollery, which led the country with 20 child liver transplants in 2005 but still has a waiting list of 12 children in Western Canada and the North.
"Donation in the Alberta region has declined over the last one to three years," she said.
"That has its effect on adults in that they succumb to their liver disease. And for us in pediatrics, we're not able to transplant the children in the timely fashion that we'd like to. They get incredibly sick, they take longer to recover and we hope there's no permanent effects from getting that sick."
The liver is the most metabolically complex human organ. It fights infection, controls blood sugar, neutralizes toxins and builds proteins and hormones.
It is the only organ that can regenerate itself and will actually grow to the appropriate size for both donor and recipient.
In 2005 there were about 50 liver transplants done on children in Canada. The average number per year is 35 to 40.
The average wait time for liver transplants for children in the Edmonton health region is nine months. For adults in Canada it's about two years.
The latest data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information shows that 3,914 patients were on waiting lists for an organ at the end of 2003, a slight decrease from the start of the decade. Patients waiting for a kidney transplant comprised three quarters of the waiting list.
The data showed that 250 patients - the equivalent of five a week - died while waiting for new organs, including 100 waiting for a liver.
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Facts on the liver from the Canadian Liver Foundation:
-The liver is the largest and most metabolically complex organ in humans.
-The liver performs over 500 different functions including fighting off infection, neutralizing toxins, manufacturing proteins and hormones, controlling blood sugar and helping to clot the blood.
-It is the only organ that can regenerate itself thus making it possible for one person to donate part of their liver to another person. When a portion of the liver is transplanted, the donor's liver will regenerate back to its original size while the transplanted portion will grow to the appropriate size for the recipient.
-At any one time, the liver contains 10 per cent of the blood in your body.
-Dr. Thomas E. Starzl performed the first human liver transplant in 1963 at the University of Colorado Medical School.
-The first liver transplant in Canada was performed by Dr. Pierre Daloze in Montreal in 1970.
-For the Greeks, the liver was considered the seat of the emotions. They examined the livers of sacrificed oxen or goats to determine whether their military campaigns would succeed. They viewed the liver as being the organ in closest contact with divinity.
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