“Miracles exist.”
That’s what Sergio Arias Cestoni, the recipient of a rare lung, heart, and liver transplant procedure at Northwell’s North Shore University Hospital, said about the surgery that saved his life from end-stage heart disease in February.
“This is a second chance at life,” said Cestoni, who is 47 and married from Hollis, Queens. He said he hopes to use it to spend more time with his wife, find a new job and return to his accounting studies at Plaza College, which he had to stop when his symptoms became too intense. He was diagnosed with ischemic cardiomyopathy in 2018.
Cestoni was released from the hospital on March 7 and said he has to attend follow-up appointments with great frequency and takes 22 pills a day, though both are set to progressively decrease as time goes on and he continues to recover.
“Mostly, I’m just excited to be able to walk again,” he added, emphasizing how nice it felt to be able to do so with ease after being unable to move more than a few steps before the surgery.
“It’s definitely not another day in the office,” said Dr. Ahmed Fahmy, a kidney transplant surgeon at Northwell’s North Shore University Hospital. Fahmy was involved in the roughly 14-hour surgery that involved 13 surgeons and two operating room nurse teams.
“When you see someone like Sergio come out from a very complicated surgery and do well, that’s very rewarding to the team. It’s why we’re doing this,” he added.
Northwell has been performing transplants since 2007 and has performed double transplants before, but this was the first triple transplant ever carried out in the hospital or Long Island.
“I’ve been part of Northwell for about eight years now,” said Sami Shah, a doctor in the hospital’s advanced heart failure department. “To see it evolve over this course of time and to be able to leverage the specialties and expertise of all the various specialties involved in this particular case has been a profound moment for Northwell.”
Read more: Long Island’s first pediatric heart transplant program launches at Northwell’s Cohen Children’s.
Fewer than five dozen procedures of this nature have been performed in the country since 1987.
All three organs were from the same anonymous deceased donor. Cestoni said he hopes to meet the donor’s family one day to express his gratitude.
“I feel like I came back to life,” he said. “I have an opportunity to live again and do things better.”
