“Marlene always had this distant, untouchable air — except when late for the hairdresser,” Bambi says, smiling. “She rushed in, kissed the hairdresser, settled beneath the dryer, stretched her long legs imperiously onto a stool, and lit a cigarette. Her gaunt pout as she smoked — I’ll never forget it,” she says, her impression exaggerated as she sucked in her cheeks. Perhaps Dietrich wasn’t her favorite star.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A woman who received a-- along with an implanted device to keep her heart beating – has died, her surgeon announced Tuesday.
Lisa Pisano was near death from kidney and heart failure when surgeons at NYU Langone Health performed the dramatic pair of surgeries in April. The New Jersey woman initially seemed to be recovering well but about 47 days later,and put Pisano back on dialysis after the organ was damaged by her heart medications.Despite the dialysis and implanted heart pump, Pisano eventually entered hospice care and died Sunday, NYU Langone transplant surgeon Dr. Robert Montgomery said in a statement.
Montgomery praised Pisano’s bravery for attempting the latest pig organ-to-human experiment, what’s called xenotransplantation. The research aims to one day shore up the dire shortage of transplantable organs.“Lisa helped bring us closer to realizing a future where someone does not have to die for another person to live,” Montgomery said. “She will forever be remembered for her courage and good nature.”
Back in April, the 54-year-old Pisano told The Associated Press that she knew the pig kidney might not work but “I just took a chance. And you know, worst case scenario, if it didn’t work for me, it might have worked for someone else.”
Pisano was the second patient ever to receive a kidney from a gene-edited pig. The first,ActBlue is expected to battle any investigation. It took a different approach when a Republican-led congressional committee launched an investigation in 2023. That committee’s findings turned out to be the basis for some of the allegations cited by Trump in his executive order.
Democrats, meanwhile, are“There is a pervasive fear that ActBlue could cease to exist,” said Matt Hodges, a veteran Democratic operative who served as the director of engineering for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. “That’s the worst fear people have — that this will escalate or drain legal resources that hinder their ability to operate.”
He predicted that the Democrats could lose more than $10 million in the short term if ActBlue were forced to shut down. That has led some Democrats to begin thinking about alternatives, but they acknowledged it might be too late to create something as successful as ActBlue with the midterms around the corner.Peoples reported from New York.