New Orleans father-daughter duo shares love and a lung | Louisiana Health

Cecilia Shaffette was born in Nov. 23, 2009. Three weeks later, she was rushed into emergency surgery.

Now 17, she was born with biliary atresia, a rare liver condition when the bile ducts become inflamed and blocked from forming correctly. It’s fatal if left untreated and is the most common reason for pediatric liver transplants, often requiring the Kasai surgical procedure for bile drainage and potentially a liver transplant later.

Just under a month old, Shaffette had a surgical procedure to connect her liver directly to her small intestine and drain the excess bile. For the next 11 years of her life, she lived in and out of the hospital with complications of severe scarring on her liver.

The Shaffette’s live in Carriere, Mississippi, right outside of Picayune — one hour from Hattiesburg, 30 minutes from Slidell and an hour from New Orleans.

“I was probably in the hospital three to four times a year,” Shaffette said. “I never really felt 100%, even when I was what they considered ‘healthy’ during that time. Going to the hospital kind of felt like having a second family.”

When Shaffette was 9, her health started to rapidly decline. Although the surgery when she was an infant was successful, the liver was not completely happy, according to her doctor, Dr. Ryan Himes.

The scarring on her liver caused a back up of blood that should have been filtering through the liver. As Himes explains, with the liver under high pressure, bile can “pop off” into blood vessels in the intestines.

“We knew at that point that she was going to need to be transplanted,” Himes said. “We don’t have other therapies that are helpful for that, aside from taking out that old, scarred liver and putting in a new one.”

For a year, the Shaffette family had their bags packed — ready to rush to the hospital the moment a liver was ready. When she was 10, she got better and was taken off the transplant list, but her health declined again when she turned 11 putting her name back on the list.

“It was hard growing up being a kid and trying to do all the things your friends are doing, go all the places your friends are going,” Shaffette said. “I had limits, because I could never be too far from my parents in case something happened.”

The family endured two more trips to the Ochsner transplant institute, with go-bags ready and hopeful hearts — only to not receive a transplant.

After a major bleed in August 2020 that landed Shaffette in the ICU, Angelle and Rhett Shaffette, her parents, weren’t willing to go through the agonizing wait again. They started to explore another option: living organ donation.

Himes, medical director of the Pediatric Liver Transplant Program at Ochsner, introduced the idea of living donation to the Shaffettes early-on in their daughter’s treatment.

“With the deceased donor list, it’s a lottery,” Himes said. “Unfortunately, with liver disease, you’re getting sicker every day that you have it. Sometimes person waiting on the list gets so sick that we can’t transplant them anymore.”

Rhett Shaffette was the first in the family to test for transplant compatibility with his daughter. For living donations, doctors look at three things: a healthy donor who can withstand surgery, a matching blood type and a good size-match for the donor.

Rhett Shaffette was a perfect match for all three.

“I had to go through I feel like every test known to man,” Rhett Shaffette said. “It was a feeling of doing what you’re supposed to do as a parent. You also just aren’t worried about yourself. The only thing you can worry about is your child in that moment.”

Living donations

Not all living donations work out like the Shaffette family. A perfect match, even between blood-related family members, is rare.

Additionally, even if a parent or family member is a blood type match and good-size match for a patient, their health to withstand the physical and mental load of surgery is an issue prevalent in Louisiana communities.

“We can’t be doing donor operations on people who have extreme obesity or people who are diabetic or people who have uncontrolled hypertension or cancer,” Himes said. “Unfortunately, sometimes even those three pretty basic things are hard to satisfy.”

All of the Shaffette family, including the youngest, 11-year-old Lydia Shaffette, were able to be in and out of the hospital with Rhett and Cecilia Shaffette as they recovered — a luxury not all families have.

Households with only one primary caregiver aren’t able to take care of the patient receiving a new organ and themselves post-surgery — another barrier often faced with families considering living organ donor transplants.

Although the practice of living donation has increased since it was introduced in the U.S. in 1989, the procedure has not picked up as much momentum as doctors and patients would like.

Between January and October 2025, there were 41,020 donations nationally — 35,097 were deceased donors and 5,923 were living donors. As of Dec. 1, 2025, there are 108,440 people on the transplant waiting list for organs.

What organs do Louisianans need? Here’s the current status of organ donations in the state.

The number of pediatric liver transplants over time hovers at around 500 year over year, according to Himes. The vast majority of those are deceased donors.

“The percentage that are done as living donors is really small,” Himes said. “Not every center does it.”

The trend — or lack thereof — is primarily due to the extra training required to do the donor surgery and coordinate it with the recipient surgery.

“(Training) just hasn’t spread as widely as we would hope,” Himes said.

In terms of recovery, there is no real difference in monitoring an organ recipient from a living or deceased donor. The only distinction is that doctors, like Himes, will check up with both the recipient and the donor post-surgery.

Life after transplants

Now, at 17-year-old, Cecilia Sheffette is living a new life. And soon, she will take her last immunosuppressant.

Having an organ transplant is like trading in one disease for another, according to Himes. The organ is new and repaired, but the body still has to accommodated for a foreign thing in the body.

Immunosuppressants are taken after an organ transplant to prevent the immune system from attacking the new organ. However, the medications often have major side effects for long-term use: susceptibility to infection, an increase risk to get sick, increase rate of diabetes, a toll on the kidneys, some risk of cancer.

A trial published in 2021 looked at carefully selected pediatric liver transplant recipients and slowly withdrew their immunosuppressant medicine. Four years later, 40% of those patients were able to come off of their medications and have normal labs and a normal liver biopsy.

“All of those risks are time-dependent,” Himes said. “And they’re really important for a child who should have 60 to 80 years of life left. So if we can get 40% of patients off of those medicines and keep their liver in good health, man, that’s a win.”

Cecilia Shaffette’s last dose of immunosuppressants is on Christmas Eve, 2025. After a life of no-contact sports to avoid the risk of injury to her abdomen, Cecilia Shaffette is playing volleyball and practicing three hours a day for the state dance competition for her high school in Mississippi.

She has big plans when she grows up: to become a pediatric hospitalist at Ochsner.

“That’s her plan,” Angelle Shaffette said. “To give back what’s been given to her.”