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  Fateful Fat TuesdayFirst Katrina, then Mardi Gras get between man and transplantBy Peggy Peck Editor's note: CNN.com has a business partnership with MedPageToday.com, which provides custom health content. A medical profile from MedPage Today appears each Tuesday.  The Martel family: From left, Meghan, Tammy, Brandon and Pierre. HEALTH LIBRARYYOUR E-MAIL ALERTS
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Or, visit Popular Alerts for suggestions. EUNICE, Louisiana (MedPage Today) The Fat Tuesday traffic in the French Quarter frittered away the minutes of survival for his precious new liver. But Pierre Martel prevailed. Martel, a 36-year-old French teacher at the elementary school here, has a genetic liver disease called primary sclerocing cholangitis, a progressive disease that eventually causes cirrhosis and the need for a new liver. For the 10 years that he lived in Louisiana, he traveled to Tulane University Medical Center in New Orleans for treatment. "That's where I thought I would eventually get a liver transplant," he said. But when he suffered a serious flare-up in November and needed to be placed immediately on the transplant waiting list, "Tulane was gone. It was underwater, and my hepatologist was gone too. He moved away, and we didn't know where he was," he said. Martel had been anticipating the problem since Katrina ripped through New Orleans, though his community was essentially high and dry. A little more than a month before the hurricane, Martel was hospitalized at Tulane for an appendectomy. Like many Americans, Martel said he was glued to the television during the days after the hurricane. "When I saw Tulane underwater, I thought, 'This is awful, and I was just there'. Then I got a little selfish and I thought, 'Uh-oh. Tulane is gone. What am I going to do if I have a flare-up?'" Problem solvedHis gastroenterologist lined up another medical center: the Ochsner Clinic, which was still open and is also a liver transplant center. "But my insurance didn't cover Ochsner, so for a while it didn't look too good, and there were phone calls back and forth for a few days," he said. "Finally, the insurance company agreed to cover treatment at Ochsner because the circumstances were so unusual." At that point, Martel and his wife, Tammy, and children, Meghan, 18, and Brandon, 6, relaxed a bit and waited for the call that would tell them a liver was available. Mardi Gras miracleThe received the first call February 1, and the second a few days later. Both were false alarms. In each case Martel and his wife had to leave the house within 15 minutes. "We were sitting in the waiting room at Ochsner when we heard that the first liver wasn't a good match, and the second time we were about a half-hour away from the hospital when we learned that it was another false alarm," he said. But the third time was the charm. "At about 6:30 p.m. on February 28 we [got] another call, and this time it was no false alarm," he said. It was, however, Fat Tuesday, the culmination of Mardi Gras, where there are celebrations in virtually every community. The biggest party was taking place in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which was primed for the first Mardi Gras after Katrina. Ochsner and the French Quarter are only blocks apart. "Do you think the traffic was bad? Oh, boy," Martel laughed. The normal three-hour car ride was stretched so much that it was after midnight before he was prepped and ready for surgery. "Which is why I got my transplant on March 1," he said. Coming together on the WebThe full details of that adventure and much more can be found on www.pierremartel.info, a Web site designed by his brother-in-law, Kyle Fontenot. to keep Martel's far-flung family and friends informed about his condition. He has several hundred relatives, including his mother, in Canada, where he was diagnosed with the liver disease in 1990 while undergoing treatment for another chronic disease, ulcerative colitis. Fontenot recommended a Web site "after repeating the story of the surgery again and again" in phone calls to Martel's family in Canada, his wife's family in Louisiana, and friends scattered around the world. Martel, a native Acadian from Moncton, New Brunswick, came to Louisiana 10 years ago when he accepted a job offer from the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, which was looking for teachers who could teach the language in elementary schools. Before he moved to Louisiana, he had worked for a year in Europe, "so I have been getting e-mails from Poland, Slovakia, England -- all around the world." Reaching out from reclinerAs he taps away on his laptop from the comfort of his recliner, Martel said that he has been getting about a dozen e-mails daily, and he thinks that has helped his recovery. Dr. George Loss, Martel's surgeon and the director of abdominal transplant at the Ochsner Multi-Organ Transplant Center, agreed that maintaining a close, supportive network eases many of the adjustments faced by transplant patients. The Web site, Loss noted, is also a way to keep family close while limiting the patient's exposure to germs. Right now, Martel is confined to his home. This is a way to reduce the risk of colds or flu that can pose problems to transplant recipients who take drugs that suppress their immune systems to lower the risk of rejection of the donor organ. "The e-mails let me know that I'm not alone while I'm going through this," he said. "It's never good to be all by yourself." 
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-- First Hurricane Katrina blew away his chosen hospital.
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