MAKING A MIRACLE

Place husband-and-wife duo David and Anita Garten into any scenario. Chances are the retired oil and gas executive and the retired economist, respectively, would approach the situation through a pragmatic lens. However, they see miracles in medicine.

It all started in 2012 when a Houston Methodist physician told David Garten that his liver was not functioning properly. In 2016, he was hospitalized due to burst esophageal varices, which are enlarged veins in the esophageal lining. This condition was life threatening. He needed to undergo a risky procedure, which could cause his liver to fail and lead to a liver transplant. While he was in the hospital, Anita Garten placed her husband on the transplant list. With his liver function appearing above the threshold to receive a transplant and him having a rare blood type, David Garten anticipated a lengthy wait for his new liver. But the perfect storm of events — a viable liver donation for which he was the only exact match — culminated in David Garten receiving a liver transplant in March 2016. His wife says his survival is nothing short of a miracle. “The physicians at Houston Methodist saved my life, and we experienced an exceptional combination of events,” says David Garten. “If you are inclined to be religious, you could call the events miraculous. We felt called to give back to the institution that gave me back my life.”

That calling led David and Anita Garten to make a generous commitment in 2019 to support the Transplant Restorative Health and Precision Medicine Fund focused on organ rejuvenation and restoration. For them, the future of transplant rests in this field that could potentially make donor organs viable for longer periods of time. Organ restoration and rejuvenation could even allow transplant surgeons to remove an organ, revitalize it and return that organ to the body so a patient can have one organ for life. Dr. A. Osama Gaber, chair of the Department of Surgery, and other physician-scientists in the J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center are researching how to someday make transplants unnecessary through organ rejuvenation and restoration. It is a reality that David and Anita Garten agree can’t come soon enough, citing the American Transplant Foundation’s statistic that notes 20 people in the U.S. die each day waiting for a transplant. “When you think of the number of people who die waiting for a transplant, you realize all the lives that could be saved if there were other options for them,” says Anita Garten. The Gartens now serve on the Houston Methodist J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center Task Force, which allows them to track progress of a goal that doesn’t seem too far off for them.

“Houston Methodist combines compassionate patient care and cutting-edge research focused on the advancement of medicine,” David Garten says. “It’s very hard to do both, and I don’t know of any institution that does it better. We feel a real commitment to this hospital, these physicians and the idea of restorative medicine.” “My dad would not have believed the advances taking place in medicine today,” adds Anita Garten, whose late father was an orthopedic and general surgeon. “We are honored to play a small part in making those advances a reality.”

– DAVID GARTEN