Home Grown Transplant chief rooted in Georgia
BY DAMON CLINE
A sizeable number of patients arriving at MCGHealth Medical Center for a kidney or pancreas transplant come from rural Georgia towns that most physicians have never heard of, let alone find on a map. But when they meet transplant surgeon Dr. James J. Wynn, they find someone who knows exactly where they’re coming from.
“I
’m as home grown as anyone around here,” says Wynn, a native of Statesboro, Ga., who has spent nearly his entire career at the Medical College of Georgia, his alma mater. Those Georgia roots help him better relate to the large rural population served by MCG, one of three transplant programs in the state. “What makes us different from the two programs in Atlanta is that we’re basically a rural program,” says Wynn, who holds the Mason Distinguished Chair in Transplant Surgery and Immunology. “We have a long track record taking care of rural Georgia.” He has performed more than 1,000 transplants since joining the MCGHealth Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Program in 1987, nearly two decades after Dr. Arthur Humphries Jr. performed MCG’s
first kidney transplant in 1968. Wynn, who worked with Humphries during his surgical residency, replaced him as medical director of the program in 1995. Wynn, who performed the first pancreas transplant at MCG in 1994, does an average of eight surgeries a week, mostly kidney transplants and creating dialysis access ports (called fistulas) in patients who will eventually need a transplant. He has worked on patients ranging from an 80-year-old to a toddler weighing less than 20 pounds. As busy as he is, he’s been even busier in the past; before Dr. Todd Merchen joined the program in 2007, and at various other times in the program’s history, Wynn was the sole surgeon. “I’m pretty sure God has given each of us a finite number of all-nighters,” he says. “I’m getting very close to using all of mine up.” continued
GEORGIA Medicine
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