From Uganda to Bari for a kidney transplant that saved the life of a 21-year-old boy. The surgery was performed at the Policlinico di Bari, the organ was taken from Padua and was transplanted by the professor Giuseppe Lucarelli and by Dr. Marco Spilotros of the Urology team I.
The boy, still a minor, had arrived in Italy five years ago with terminal renal failure and was immediately followed by Dr. Mario Giordano, director of pediatric nephrology of John XXIII, and initiated into dialysis treatment. He was welcomed with his older sister by the Franciscan community of Father Carmelo in Sannicandro and today he lives in a foster family in Altamura and attends the scientific high school.
“Merek in Uganda, to undergo dialysis, was forced to travel 450 kilometers to reach the hospital in the capital, Kampala, one of only two dialysis centers in the country”, explains professor Loreto Gesualdo, regional coordinator of the transplant center and director of nephrology at the Polyclinic.
“I risked my life to get here – says Merek from his bed in the transplant center – now I can say that I made it. In these years of suffering I built the dream of becoming a doctor. I am studying. I want to attend university here. in Italy and then I want to go back to Uganda to help people who suffer there “.
“Uganda – explains Gesualdo – is a country of 40 million inhabitants with only five doctors specializing in Nephrology. We have opened in collaboration with the University of Mbarara, in the Puglia village of the city, a dialysis center with eight stations”.
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