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SPRING 2009
An Affair of the Heart ... and Lungs Twenty years of heart and lung transplant at UNC Hospitals by Edward Byrnes
W
hen Dr. Ben Wilcox recruited Dr. Michael Mill to be a part of UNC’s fledgling heartlung transplant program in 1988, Mill took comfort in the knowledge that Wilcox, then the chief of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at UNC, already had two transplant surgeons on staff starting up the program. But by the time Mill arrived on campus, both of those surgeons had left. “It was a challenge, but it was a good challenge— having to walk in and essentially resurrect a program and do it the way I wanted to,” recalls Mill, now chief of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at UNC Hospitals. Mill had attended medical school at the University of Colorado, where Dr. Thomas Starzl was the chair of the surgery department. Starzl had performed the department’s first successful kidney transplant in 1962. Four years later, in 1967, Starzl became world-famous when he performed the first-ever successful liver transplant. When Mill arrived in Denver in 1976, Starzl was already well known as “the father of liver transplantation.” Although organ transplants were being done in several places across the country, there was still no structured way to obtain donor organs. But Starzl’s program was widely known throughout Colorado, and
during Mill’s five years of general surgery training there, he was often pulled into service to retrieve donor organs or entire bodies from all across the state. “We’d go out on ‘donor runs’ and get kidneys, or we’d bring a body back for [Starzl and his team] to do a transplant,” Mill recalls. And Mill remembers how Starzl would commandeer the operating room and situate the donor in one room with multiple recipients prepared for transplants in adjoining rooms. “He’d have the donor in one room, the kidney recipient in another, and a liver recipient in a third room. He’d have one team taking out the kidney in one patient and another team taking out the liver in the other patient while he’d be harvesting the organs from the donor. Then he’d take the liver over and transplant it in the first recipient and then he’d go to the next room and do the first kidney transplant in there. Then, by that time, they would have gotten the second kidney recipient in and put him to sleep. Starzl would go in and do the second kidney transplant. Then he’d disappear for a day or two,” says Mill with a laugh. Mill left CU for Stanford, where he spent three years in residencies in cardiovascular and thoracic surgery. He also spent six months of that time as a chief resident