UTICA, Mich. – A special moment Friday night at Jimmy John’s Field as a local liver transplant patient and his donor threw out the first pitch at tonight’s baseball game.
The game was dedicated to Living Donor Awareness.
Baseball and Living Donor Transplants seem like an unlikely match, but tonight at Jimmy John’s Field in Utica, Local 4 found out they have more in common than you might think.
“I think of Living Donor Liver Transplant as a triple play,” said liver transplant recipient Dave Galbnski.
You’ve got the person who needs an organ transplant, a compassionate donor, and a healthcare system.
Galbnski knows the play all too well.
In 2013 he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called PSC.
“It was a situation where they said there’s really no treatment other than a liver transplant when your liver begins to fail,” Galbnski said.
In February 2019, he was put on the transplant list, but little did he know his brother-in-law, Mark Dybis, had started testing to become a donor.
“It was very difficult to keep it quiet,” said Dybis, the liver donor. “I wanted to talk to Dave desperately, but at any step of the program, you can fall off that list, and you definitely do not want to do that.”
When Dybis became a match, they set a date for as soon as possible, and in November 2019, they had a successful surgery through Henry Ford Health Hospital.
“It literally saved my life,” Galbnski said. “The beauty of Living Donor Liver Transplant, not only do you save the life of the recipient, but you also free up another organ from the transplant list.”
Galvnski said that being at Friday night’s baseball felt like a double header.
The game at Jimmy Johns Field was dedicated to Living Donor Awareness, and they hoped to inspire others as they threw the first pitches with their transplant surgeon and a nurse.
Dybis was honored as a hometown hero.
“It’s quite easy to recover,” Dybis said. “Six weeks and a human liver returns to its full mass. You wouldn’t even figured it happened.”
Galbnski and his wife launched a site to bring more awareness to living organ donors, which can be seen here.
