Greg G . Interview

Prior to his liver transplant, Greg and his wife wanted to talk to people who had been through the transplant experience. He searched the Internet, found lots of facts, but no web site where he could share information with people who had "been there, done that". After his transplant he decided to form Transplant Central so that organ transplant patients could help each other.

Greg: My name is Greg. I’ve been a filmmaker all my life and that’s pretty much all I’ve done. I’ve directed films, documentaries mostly, edited. And probably about seven years ago, something like that, I found out that my liver values were not looking good. I was feeling fine. I thought I was fine. I kept thinking maybe if I take that magic herb that something that would reverse it so that it wouldn’t get quite so bad. And the doctors all told me, “No, no, no one day you will find out that, everybody thinks that”. Everybody thinks there’s that magic bullet and so I’m here today because I had that transplant and that time came that I did have to change my life.
Q: What kind of transplant was it?
Greg: Eight months ago I had a liver transplant at UCLA and I was on the waiting list for almost exactly a year. And I almost died numerous times prior to that. I found that I was getting very, mentally certain chemicals build up in your body, ammonia, that will affect your brain and you can become very forgetful. And also certain things that can happen is that your blood vessels in your esophagus, they call it esophageal varicies, where the pressure builds up and they just pop. And you don’t know when they are gonna pop. But when they do you have basically a 50-50 chance of living. And one night I was home, Janet my wife works in Intensive Care and she was working nights, and I didn’t feel like I was quite right and I called her and I told her that. And I pretty much, the next thing I knew she had come home after her working hours, and apparently there was blood all over the kitchen, all over the bathroom, on the walls, on the floor, and I knew nothing about it. And because she works in a hospital and she knows that changes of shift happen at certain times she said, “Look we’ll just wait until the morning and then we’ll go”. And I don’t remember anything. I was in a coma. I physically walked down the stairs here at the house. I physically under my own power made it into the emergency room. I don’t remember any of it at all. The doctors told her I had a 50-50 chance of living.
Q: How soon after that did you receive your transplant.
Greg: A year, because at the time it was Halloween which was I found, because of my sense of humor, I thought it was a very strange time to be in the hospital fighting for your life. There’s ghosts and goblins and skeletons hanging from the ceiling it’s just too strange you know. So a year later it turns out I got that telephone call to go in for a liver. And guess what? It’s Halloween again. And you know, sick as I was and all of that, I still thought you know here I am in the hospital again and there’s still skeletons and crossbones on the walls and stuff. And so in answer to your question, yes it was a year.
Q: What kinds of questions did you have prior to your transplant?
Greg: My biggest worry, honestly, was not so much death because there was something in me that knew that I was going to make it. There was something there. What I was afraid of was pain. I was afraid that I was going to be in agonizing pain in the hospital and that. You know I’ve known people that have been in the hospital with morphine drips and nothing worked. And that was my biggest fear.
Q: Did you come to realize those fears?
Greg: Surprisingly no. Amazingly there was a so little pain from the actual surgery that I was astounded. There’s pain later when they ask you to get up that first day. It feels like everything is going to fall out. And it is painful like that when they make you walk down the hallway every day. But right after the surgery, no, because they cut you wide open. You have a scar that looks like a Mercedes Benz sign. And in the process they cut the nerves so that essentially it is numb. And your inside aren’t really enervated very much so it was not realized. I did not have that much pain.
Q: How has your transplant changed your outlook on life?
Greg: Completely.
Q: How so?
Greg: When I was 18 years old all my ambitions were probably very similar to lots of 18 year olds, not all but lots, of money and fame and seeing the world and making it in the film business. Actually at that age I had not even thought of being in the film business. I was going into a business but I didn’t know what it was going to be, so I was an undergraduate businessperson. Then I became a filmmaker. And I decided by the time I was 30 I was going to have something on the air, which I did on PBS. And I went on and did lots of other things in the Hollywood arena. All for entertainment. All for basically selling something, with my skills and talents, that I didn’t really believe in. I started out filmmaking to do things that I believed in, but I couldn’t make a living doing things I believed in. Now that I’ve had my transplant, money and physical things, all that is irrelevant. It is 100 percent unimportant. So I want to take the talents that I have, that I have honed in an arena that I wasn’t particularly fond of, and give back some of what I have been given. And that all is 180 degrees different from where I was before my transplant.
Q: Is it difficult for transplant candidates, transplant patients, to get the answers to their questions and to get information that they might need for emotional support?
Greg: Well what I found was that when you become a transplant candidate, let me back up even. Before you become a transplant candidate and your liver values are starting to go south on you a little bit, they’re not looking very good. The doctors say, “Your liver values are looking a little bit problematical”. And then you start falling into certain categories: A, B, and C,1,2,3. You don’t really know what it means. And at that point they’re not really even telling you all that much. Then as things start becoming more serious and it’s pretty obvious that you need a transplant, maybe in my case they give me a little bit more information, but I don’t recollect any booklets or pamphlets or anything to read, or hardly any verbal information. When I got on the transplant list, which was because I ended up having bleeding varicies, and my wife saved my life by giving me, and essentially browbeating the people at the facility I was at, to send me to UCLA. That’s what got me on the list. And once I was on the list the drug companies like to send you information and you can get medical information, and there’s lot of good places on the Internet to go look for it. But one, you don’t particularly feel like doing it because you don’t feel all that well. And two, the information that you do get is very clinical and I think a lot of people share the feeling that I have that doctors don’t really necessarily tell you everything that you want to know. And I would rather hear it from somebody who has been through it, or at least I feel is being honest and straight with me. So although there is good information and it is available if you know where to find it, what I really needed and wanted was something that somebody, and that was my access to that information, just by giving me something that I could put in the palm of my hand, and go.