Eleftheria Chatzifilippidou, a young woman from Thessaloniki, who from 2000 to 2014 has undergone three kidney transplants.

At the age of just 13 years old was diagnosed with chronic end-stage renal failureas a result, in 2000, at the age of 17, she was led to the first kidney transplant, which, however, failed. Then her mother was the donor.

Six years later she underwent a transplant again, with a graft given to her by her father. But shortly after the second transplant, she was diagnosed with sclerosing peritonitis, which created a serious problem in her intestines and abdomen, as a result of which she underwent continuous surgeries. Due to her health condition, the graft started to fail and since 2011 she started dialysis.

In 2014, thanks to the donation of the organs of a 54-year-old woman who died in Crete, Eleftheria, undergoing a transplant again, got the kidney she has been living with for the last 10 years.

Today, speaking to APE-MPE about her health adventure, she says: “I am in good health, the prices of the tests are good. But I still live with the anxiety of what will happen if the graft is lost tomorrow. Living in Greece and seeing all that is happening, this anxiety still exists. If I could give a message that message would be: “let’s keep an open mind, learn what organ donation means, learn a little more than what we know so far, because there is so much misinformation out there. Organ donation can only do good . When someone dies, instead of their organs rotting away and being eaten by worms, they can give life to a patient who needs them“”.

Fighting for life since the age of 13

Narrating her health adventure, Eleftheria says: “I was diagnosed at 13 years old with end-stage chronic renal failure. And from there on, because my health could not be maintained in good condition with diet, I had to enter extrarenal dialysis.

For a year and a half I fought it only with diet. When my test results were too bad, I had to put in a peritoneal catheter and start peritoneal dialysis. At that time it was the only method that a 14-year-old child could do, when his growth and blood vessels are not yet well developed to be able to do hemodialysis. That was in 1996. I started learning to do peritoneal dialysis at the AHEPA hospital so I could do it at home. It is a method that is done at home and has a good thing, that you do not have direct contact with the hospital, except once a month. In 2000, at the age of 17, the first transplant took place at AHEPA. The pre-transplant checkup was done at Hippocrate of Thessaloniki, which is the only transplant center in Northern Greece. But then AHEPA was also trying to become a transplant center, so I did the transplant there with the kidney my mother gave.

Unfortunately the transplant did not go well at all, mainly for medical reasons. We were told that the kidney was working but that I needed to continue doing peritoneal dialysis to help the body. After three months, however, I saw that there was no salvation. I kept running a 40 degree fever because I had a dead organ inside me. The body rejected it normally, I had to take the graft out and continue to do normal peritoneal dialysis.”

One problem brought another

From this whole process, Liberty’s body developed cytotoxic antibodies. “This means that the body has antibodies that react to any new transplant you want to do. It reacts to accept something new. I did a lot of treatments for it, I repeatedly immunoabsorbed Papageorgiou. Finally, the right treatment was done at the People’s Hospital of Athens, at the transplant center, where six years after the first transplant, the second one was done with my father as a donor. The transplant was done, everything went well.

The graft worked very well, my rates were very good, and at some point, after seven months, we had to remove the indwelling peritoneal catheter that I had had for so many years and I did peritoneal dialysis. Taking it out, the surgeons saw that a very serious problem had developed in the intestines, inside my abdomen. I had sclerosing peritonitis, as a result of which I was operated on many times by the transplant surgeons of the People’s Hospital to treat this disease, which is very difficult. We knew that sclerosing peritonitis, diagnosed seven months after the transplant, can over time take its toll on the heart and kidney. In the heart I had no problem, but the graft shrunk and stopped working.

Because the peritoneal catheter had been removed and because due to the continuous surgeries it was no longer possible to use a peritoneal catheter, from 2011 to 2014 I had hemodialysis. In 2014, a cadaver graft was donated by a 54-year-old woman from Crete and I again underwent a transplant in Laiko. Since 2014 I have been fine. The only thing that upsets me is some UTIs that transplant recipients get, but the transplant works very well and my rates are amazing. But I live with the anxiety of what will happen if the graft is lost”, explains Eleftheria Hatzifilippidou.