Pediatric surgical nurse donates liver to 2-year-old patient

In early November 2024, Kelly Smith and her husband received the phone call they had been waiting for since summer–a living liver donor that was a match for their two-year-old daughter, Quinnlyn.

What they didn’t know was that their donor was close to home: Phil Consiglio is a nurse where Quinnlyn got her care at University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.

And helping Quinnlyn was Consiglio’s second time donating an organ as part of a promise he’d made many years ago.

A rare diagnosis after birth

When Quinnlyn was born in 2022, she was having trouble keeping her temperature at a steady rate.

After taking her home from the hospital, Smith noticed that her newborn daughter was uninterested in eating and seemed very tired.

She decided to take Quinnlyn’s temperature; the thermometer read 93.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

“I didn’t believe it, so I tried multiple other thermometers in multiple other locations,” said Smith.

“Each one came back the same and I knew we needed to get her back to our local hospital fast.”

Upon arrival to the hospital, the family was told that Quinnlyn’s blood sugar was extremely low and if she had fallen asleep, she would have gone into a diabetic coma.

At the same time, her newborn screening results came back showing that she had a genetic metabolic condition called propionic acidemia.

The next two years of Quinnlyn’s life were full of genetic tests, many hospital stays, and consistent monitoring.

By the summer of 2024, she was placed on the liver transplant waiting list at University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.

“Her body was starting to give up, it couldn’t fight the disease anymore,” said Smith.

The Smith family were told that a living donor or deceased donor would work as options for their daughter.

“I had a hard time wrapping my head around that,” said Smith.

“We had two false alarms, and I had a hard time processing that the organ would be coming from a family that was grieving their child. I hoped and prayed that Quinnlyn could hold out for a living donor instead.”

A living donor fulfilling a promise

Meanwhile, Consiglio, a surgical nurse at Mott, had made a promise to a patient, and he had to make good on that promise.

While some people were contemplating leaving the nursing profession during the COVID-19 pandemic, Consiglio decided to give it a shot in the fall of 2020.

“I worked as an ICU nurse at a southeast Michigan area hospital, and one of my first patients I took care of out of orientation I became very close with,” Consiglio said.

“After several months, they weren’t doing well and were on a ventilator, so they had to write everything down to communicate. They wrote that their kidneys weren’t doing well, and I was just compelled to respond back that I promised them one of my own.”

Consiglio admitted he didn’t know how involved that was going to be, but it was worth it to help his patient and newfound friend.

But when he returned to the hospital for his next shift a few days later, the patient had passed.

“If I was there when they passed away, I wouldn’t still be in the nursing profession today,” Consiglio said. 

“It just destroyed me.”

Looking for a donor opportunity 

A year had gone by and Consiglio kept thinking about how he hadn’t fulfilled his promise.

“I just started thinking about logistics and reached out to the University of Michigan Transplant Center,” Consiglio said.

After questionnaires, several tests, labs and visits, Consiglio got the green light for the kidney donor surgery and in November 2022 successfully donated his kidney to an anonymous recipient.

“I was reborn from the time I woke up from that surgery,” Consiglio said. “I felt like a different person and everything about my life changed that day.”

“Going down the road of becoming a nurse, you dedicate your life to saving lives,” he said. 

“For the longest time I didn’t feel like it was always saving lives - it was preventing the inevitable. Now it felt like I was really saving a life and switched my mindset from just dedicating my career to this, but also my life.”

Consiglio eventually became an OR nurse at Mott, often working on pediatric transplant cases.

“I was doing pediatric liver transplants with the team, and these kids are as critically sick as they can be,” Consiglio said.

“You do the surgery, and the recipient looks completely different; you wouldn’t know that 36 hours before they were on death’s doorstep and so, so sick. It is completely life-changing for these kids and a liver is curative and transformative for most kids and they do so well after the surgery.”

In May 2024, Consiglio felt called again.

“I got in contact with the transplant team again and said ‘ok, I’m ready for my liver,’” Consiglio said.

“Honestly, I was a little shocked they didn’t try harder to stop me,” he added with a laugh. 

“To my knowledge, there are around 55 to 60 dual kidney and liver donors in the United States. Essentially, there are very few people that have done this.”

It took longer to find a recipient than with his kidney, as the waitlist is much smaller for a liver, and he knew he wanted to donate to a pediatric patient. But stars aligned in fall of 2024 when his liver was determined to be a match for Quinnlyn.

Living donation success

Early on a December morning in 2024, both Consiglio and Quinnlyn were prepped by their respective surgical teams for the liver transplant.

Christopher Sonnenday, M.D., the director of the U-M Health Transplant Center performed the first procedure of removing part of Consiglio’s liver.

He then gave the organ to Meredith Barrett, M.D., a clinical assistant professor of surgery at Mott to transport the organ in a cooler from the U-M Health Taubman Center to Mott.

“I am lucky enough to work with Phil in the OR on pediatric transplant cases, so being able to work on his case where he donated an organ to a Mott patient was an honor,” said Barrett.

 I’ve had this beautiful revelation that I’m not here on this earth for me. My purpose is for others, and just working through that and processing that has been the biggest blessing ever. But now, it’s also about finding a way to get the message out there that it’s not pain free, but organ donation is so far and beyond worth it.” 

-Phil Consiglio, R.N.

“I knew he was Quinnlyn’s donor from the start and was so excited for both him and Quinnlyn. Seeing how the work we do moved someone I work with to donate was nothing short of amazing.”

The procedure was a success.

“When Dr. Barrett came and told me that everything went well, I burst into tears and just felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders,” said Smith.

“My next question to her was, ‘Is the donor okay?’”

Recovering

Quinnlyn ended up staying in Mott for 37 days after her transplant. She experienced some complications that required follow up procedures.

“It was rough after the transplant, we knew that it wasn’t going to fix everything, but we didn’t expect Quinnlyn to need to stay in the pediatric intensive care unit or Mott for so long,” said Smith.

“The team of doctors kept reminding us it is a marathon not a sprint, and to keep reminding ourselves of that. It was extremely hard to do, of course when its your child.”

Just after Christmas though, Quinnlyn began turning a corner. 

She no longer needed a breathing tube, and her kidneys were beginning to move back towards normal functioning.

“Her body started getting stronger and they were able to send us home,” said Smith.

“The liver transplant wasn’t a cure to her condition, and we knew it wouldn’t be, but it takes some strain off her body and gives her body extra strength. It will give her a better quality of life where she can enjoy more things that a child should be able to!”

For Consiglio, his recovery was more painful than his kidney transplant, but nothing unbearable.

Due to the location of the incision, he found that his muscles were in more pain than he anticipated.

"I was back to normal by the end of the fifth week of recovery, which was a bit longer than I expected," said Consiglio.

“However, I know that a few weeks of physical pain is not even a drop in the bucket to all the other joyful emotions you experience knowing you just helped someone else.”

Meeting for the first time

Throughout the recovery process, the Smith family expressed interest in meeting Consiglio.

He and his family also shared this interest, and the two families worked through the Mott social work team to find a time and location meet for the first time.

In the beginning of April 2025, the two families met for the first time at Mott.

“Meeting Phil for the first time was really emotional,” said Smith.

“He saved my daughter, if he didn’t come into her life, she would still be getting sick and possibly be experiencing a lot more life-threatening issues. It was a miracle that he was here and chose to donate his liver. He is truly a gift sent from God that answered all our prayers!”

For Consiglio, he was equally as emotional.

“Meeting the Smiths and seeing Quinnlyn was beyond my wildest dreams. I feel like I met my second family,” he said.

“For this all to work out the way it did and have my donation hopefully take a load off their shoulders means the world to me. Seeing Quinnlyn and knowing she is now doing well brought a new level of joy to my decision that I didn’t think was possible. I don’t know if I have really been able to process all of it and the positive impact this has had on me.”

The two families felt an instant connection with each other as well. Both Smith and Consiglio said that they felt they had known each other’s families forever and felt welcomed on both sides. 

Quinnlyn also took to Consiglio right away, giving him lots of hugs and continuous high fives.

"Since meeting each other we text almost every day,” said Smith.

“We have upcoming day dates set up to get together with our families and even make sure to meet up when we are at the hospital for Quinnlyn’s appointments if the stars align.”

Advocating for living donation in the future

Quinnlyn’s transplant was one of the 131 liver transplants completed across adult and pediatric patients at the U-M Health Transplant Center in 2024, breaking the state of Michigan record for the most liver transplants done in a year.

Consiglio doesn’t see himself donating any more organs soon, but that doesn't mean that he is done giving the gift of life.

“I regularly donate blood and I’m in the process of becoming a bone marrow donor,” he said.

“I’ve had this beautiful revelation that I’m not here on this earth for me. My purpose is for others, and just working through that and processing that has been the biggest blessing ever. But now, it’s also about finding a way to get the message out there that it’s not pain free, but organ donation is so far and beyond worth it.”

Consiglio hopes his experiences will motivate others to consider organ donations.

He is also working with the U-M Health Transplant Center to become a mentor for other living donors.

“I want to find enough people that we wipe out these waitlists,” Consiglio said.

“If we can eliminate that grief for families where their loved one doesn’t receive a donation in time, that’s where I’m pivoting now in sharing my story and getting people to sign up.”

For Quinnlyn, receiving her gift of organ donation has allowed her to become stronger and spend more time being a kid and less time receiving treatment.

“Quinnlyn is still being fed from a G-Tube, but we are now able to start her on baby food purees, something we couldn’t do before,” said Smith.

“She has much more energy, is working hard on crawling, trying to walk in her gate trainer and is getting a little chattier every day. She loves walks in her wagons, spending time with her older brother and would live in our family pool if she could.”

To learn more about giving the gift of life visit wolverinesforlife.org.

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