PHYSICIAN SPOTLIGHT: Kenneth Sellers, MD

For this physician, the miracles arrive on a consistent basisYears ago, Kenneth Sellers, MD, learned of a quote from Mark Twain, and it has stuck with him ever since. He taught it to the residents at UT College of Medicine in Memphis when he was associate professor of surgery:“Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”Now, as medical director of Mid-South Transplant Foundation, Sellers is not necessarily astonished, but certainly gratified, when people do the thing and donate hearts, lungs, livers or kidneys, either their own or a loved one’s.Many years after he performed kidney transplants as a young surgeon in the early 1970s, Sellers now works on the procurement side, a job he calls “very rewarding, very frustrating at times.”“But I say that every time we get a donor, it’s a miracle for some family,” he said.Sellers grew up in the Missouri Bootheel town of Caruthersville and was majoring in engineering at the University of Missouri when he decided to switch to medicine. At the University of Tennessee in Memphis, he found a mentor in Dr. Louis Britt, who had started doing kidney transplants.“He was very much an inspiration to me,” Sellers said, “so I started helping him with his transplants because he was basically doing them alone in Memphis; nobody else was doing them.”Britt later started the first trauma center at UT, “and he kind of pushed me toward trauma, so I did trauma for a couple of years,” said Sellers, who served as director of the emergency room at Memphis City Hospital.He moved on to Blytheville, Arkansas, to open a practice, then came back to Memphis 13 years later at the urging of Britt, who wanted him to teach “old-fashioned general surgery.”Soon thereafter Sellers joined the board at Mid-South Transplant Foundation, later became assistant medical director and then medical director five years ago. He retired from UT three years ago.He supervises a staff of well-trained family care specialists and critical care nurses who perform what Sellers calls a “very complicated process, anywhere from 24 to 48 hours of intense activity to obtain an organ donor.” Once a donor’s consent is obtained by the family care specialists, the nurses are instrumental in maintaining the organs so they remain viable for transplant.Heart transplantation is the trickiest, he said, because “they’re very fragile and probably the hardest for us to procure and transplant. They’re difficult because they have to be perfect hearts and fairly young people. By the time a patient becomes a donor, often times the heart has had so much injury to it from whatever caused the patient to have the brain injury that they cannot be used.”Most heart donations come in the wake of shootings and car accidents. Some come from stroke victims, but those people, Sellers said, are generally older and sicker, “so they’re not usually good candidates for heart donation. They’re usually in the range of 50 to 60 years old, and we don’t do hearts that are much older than 40.”Despite best efforts, the number of those who need transplants is growing faster than the number of donors. Sellers said close to 120,000 people are on the national waiting list, including at least 80,000 for kidneys, which are the most common transplant, followed by livers and then hearts and lungs.“Our goal several years ago was to stop the waiting list (from growing), and for about a year or so they were able to keep it relatively stable,” he said. “But it’s growing again. There’s just not enough donors for every organ. People are dying waiting for an organ.”Having donor registries has helped, with people going to departments of motor vehicles or signing up online to indicate they want to be an organ donor.“If everybody would register, it would make donation much more likely and the whole process less traumatic on the families,” Sellers said. “Families who have a sudden catastrophic event are often not making rational decisions and refuse to donate for reasons they probably, if they had time to think about it, they would not decline. Right now our biggest problem is getting donor families to agree to a donation.”Misconceptions, myths and occasionally religion sometimes result in families not donating. Fairly common is the fear that a hospital won’t care properly for a loved one “because all we want is the organs,” Sellers said. Some incorrectly believe the body will be mutilated, making it impossible for the family to have an open casket.“A lot of families bring that up, but that just doesn’t occur,” he said. “It’s just an incision like you’d have for an operation.”Another misconception is that transplantation is experimental. On the contrary, Sellers said, liver and kidney recipients are long-term survivors with basically normal function. Transplanted hearts are lasting 10 to 15 years.“If a young heart is in the right patient,” he said, “that patient will be able to do pretty much what they want to do.”Transplants are more successful for longer periods of time and hospital stays are shorter than they were years ago because modern drugs, primarily cyclosporine, suppress rejection.“We have success stories every day,” Sellers said. “We have children who are 24 hours from dying who get a donated organ and they’re up and running around in a week.“We have a ceremony every year where donor families come back and they are very happy. I’ve never had a donor family come back and say they were sorry they donated. We’ve had them come back and say they were sorry they didn’t donate.”