Ten-year old Sarah Murnaghan, a little girl suffering from cystic fibrosis who doctors had predicted had only several weeks left to live, recently underwent a life-saving lung transplant after a court battle that pushed to allow her to be at the top of the transplant list despite her age, CBS6 reports, and has woken up from her coma and is now responsive.
Murnaghan received her new lungs on June 12 after a six-hour surgery, and a family spokesperson tells CBS6 that while she remains on a ventilator and is still unable to talk, she is nodding and shaking her head in response to questions. The adult lungs she received were modified just for her.
"Sarah got THE CALL," her mother, Janet Murnaghan, wrote on her Facebook page before the operation, according to ABC News. "She will be taken back to the O.R. in 30 minutes."
Sarah Murnaghan was born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition in which patients typically suffer severe lung damage that can result in respiratory failure.
Due to transplant laws in which adult lungs were prioritized to adults no matter the severity of their conditions, as children's lungs are very rare, Murnaghan was initially low on the transplant list even though her lungs were rapidly deteriorating and doctors predicted she had less than five weeks to live. A little girl who loves music, she has been in and out of the hospital her whole life, and her condition was quickly worsening. She had been on the waiting list to receive new lungs for 18 months.
"We knew at some point, she would need new lungs," her father, Fran Murnaghan, said in May. "We had hoped it would be much further down the road, but the disease has progressed."
Her family contacted Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, petitioning her to change the rules regarding transplants so that their daughter under age 12 could be prioritized. Although Sebelius had said previously she did not have the authority to intervene on this case, she did call for a policy review, though it was one that could take several years to enact any change. The Murngahans knew they were running out of time, so they involved a lawyer and a federal judge.
"The Under 12 Rule is unfair, arbitrary and capricious, inconsistent with the statute and regulations, and stands in the way of Sarah potentially receiving a set of lungs that she needs to live," wrote Stephen G. Harvey, the family's lawyer.
Other lawmakers pushed for the rule to change, and on June 5, a federal judge granted the family's wish for their daughter to be prioritized and ordered Sebelius to to direct the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network to waive the transplant rule.
