Peekskill man receives 1st heart-liver-kidney transplant in New York
Mount Sinai Transplant Surgeon Dr. Sandy Florman says Godbee's surgery was the first heart-liver-kidney transplant in New York and took about 22 hours to complete.
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One of the two patients from Westchester who received the first heart-liver-kidney transplants in New York is speaking to News 12 about the success of his historic operation.
Mack Godbee, 64, is no stranger to heart transplants. The retired crane worker from Peekskill says he got his first one from Mount Sinai back in 2002.
While the transplant was helpful for a while, he says he started to experience some complications that ultimately put him in the hospital in December.
"You know, they're saying the liver is going, the kidneys were going, and it was just a batch of things that were, you know, on my mind. I was like, 'I don't know if I'm going to make it through this,'" Godbee says.
Godbee says he needed a new heart, kidney and liver to survive.
About a month later, all three organs became available, at the same time, from the same donor.
"I really thought, maybe, I was just going to get like the heart and have to worry about everything else later. But then the doctors were like, 'We're going to try something, but you know, it's going to be daring,'" Godbee says.
The daring triple transplant took place in January.
Mount Sinai Transplant Surgeon Dr. Sandy Florman says Godbee's surgery was the first heart-liver-kidney transplant in New York and took about 22 hours to complete.
"It was excellent," Dr. Florman said. "The ability to do this as a team was really quite remarkable and probably explains why there's so few that are done."
Officials at the hospital say only 58 of these transplants have been done in the country since the 1980s.
Although he's expected to make a full recovery, Godbee says he's now using his transplant story to raise awareness about organ donation.
"They say be an organ donor, but a lot of people don't know what the means, but it means a lot to the people that are giving and the people that are receiving," Godbee says.
Godbee says he doesn't know who his donor is yet, but thanks them and their family for giving him the gift of life.
