For the last five years, the Transplant Surgery Intensive Care Unit (TSICU) at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center (TMC) has been spreading holiday cheer by sponsoring local children and their fulfilling Christmas wish lists. This year, a handful of children who live in the Houston area were randomly chosen from four different schools. If any of the selected children had siblings, they too were asked to write out a wish list that was then sponsored by the Memorial Hermann-TMC TSICU staff.
Through the generous, personal donations from the TSICU team of nurses, health unit coordinators, patient care assistants, affiliated UTHealth physicians, pharmacists, dieticians, palliative nurse and respiratory therapists, the unit was able to fulfill the wish lists, checking off every single item, for 13 different children. The gifts – ranging from dolls, bikes, and LEGO sets to Xbox consoles and even laptops – have been wrapped and placed under the unit’s tree for the children to come open on Christmas Day.
The experienced affiliated physicians and staff at the Center for Abdominal Organ Transplantation and Regenerative Medicine at Memorial Hermann-TMC, in partnership with UTHealth, provide state-of-the-art, compassionate, multidisciplinary care to adult and pediatric patients with end-stage liver, kidney and/or pancreas disease. Long known as a local and national leader in organ transplantation, the team has performed more than 3,000 transplants, including the first liver transplant in Houston in 1985, since the program’s inception nearly four decades ago.