2023-11-20 22:10:00
“My daughters had never heard me speak.” Karine, 49, found her voice thanks to a larynx transplant after breathing through a tracheotomy for twenty years. The intervention, carried out on September 2 and 3 by a medical team from the Lyon University Hospital, is a first in France.
“It feels weird to talk again,” she says. Since 1996, after she had to be intubated due to cardiac arrest, she could no longer speak. But thanks to the twelve surgeons and around fifty staff from the Lyon University Hospital who participated in his operation, under the coordination of Professor Céruse and his colleague Lionel Badet, head of the urology and transplant surgery department of the Edouard Herriot hospital, it is once again possible to hear the sound of his voice.
Obviously, there is still work; She has since followed vocal cord, swallowing and breathing rehabilitation sessions with a speech therapist to recover all her abilities, and she claims to be armed with “courage” and “patience”.
This complex operation was carried out for the first time in the United States in 1998. Another took place there in 2010, and a third took place in Poland in 2015. In France, it was a first. To carry out this mission, Professor Céruse went to train with Dr. Luis Fernando Tintinago Londono, in Cali.
The team, “proud” of this “prowess”, nevertheless remains cautious. “It is the patient who will say if it is a success,” notes Professor Céruse, noting that it will take 12 to 18 months for her to regain motor function in her larynx “the time for nerve regrowth”.
He will therefore wait until she is “perfectly well” before embarking on other adventures. The Lyon transplant teams believe in particular that after the arms, forearms and larynx, it will be the turn “within the next two years for uterus and penis transplants”.
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