9/11 grounded US flights, but strangers moved a liver 800 miles to save a baby

Dr Goss with little Kareena after her successful surgery On September 11, 2001, while the US was dealing with the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, a six-month-old baby in Houston was fighting for her life. Kareena needed a liver transplant, but the donor organ was nearly 800 miles away in Nashville, and the civilian flights across the US had been grounded.The liver, packed in ice inside a box roughly two feet by one foot, eventually reached Houston aboard a C-130 cargo plane, Houston Chronicle reported. The aircraft, operated by the Tennessee Air National Guard, carried the organ from Nashville to Ellington Field. From there, soldiers took it to Texas Children’s Hospital, where doctors were waiting to perform the transplant.Kareena had been born with biliary atresia, a congenital defect in which the ducts that drain bile from the liver do not form. Because the bile could not drain properly, her liver became badly damaged at a very young age. By September 2001, she had spent most of her short life in the Texas Medical Center and was too sick to go home.“She was too ill to leave the hospital,” Dr John Goss, the hospital’s medical director for transplant services, told Houston...