Diep and her father after the liver transplant surgery in January 2004.

Seventeen years ago, the girl underwent liver transplantation in the Medical Military Academy when she was nine years old as she was born with congenital biliary atresia, a condition in which a child is born with one or more bile ducts abnormally narrow or blocked. The liver donor was his father.

The 15-hour surgery helped her to get back to her life. After graduating from high school, she studied at a medical military college in Hanoi and then she was recruited to work at the Hanoi-based Military Hospital 103 in the medicine classification department.

However, in the end of 2019, she had been experiencing weight loss and fatigue caused by severe cirrhosis for months as she underwent treatment at Hanoi’s Military Hospital 103 and waited for another liver transplant.

She was rushed to the hospital on November 28 when she experienced massive bleeding and physicians’ efforts to save her were unrewarded. Her relatives took her home and she died on the next day.

According to Doctor Bui Van Manh, head of the intensive care and anti-poison unit at Military Hospital 103, Diep is the liver transplant patient having the longest life after the surgery in Vietnam. He added that the transplanted liver has limited longevity.